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The Foundation series dates back to a time when it was still scientifically credible to believe that with enough mathematical information about the current state of the universe, you can accurately predict the future. Even thousand of years from now.
It's kind of cute.
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@isaacfreeman
> Asimov did portray it as a statistical model that gave probabilities of events
Sure, but even this assumes a level of future predictably that's totally unrealistic. Even when it comes to purely physical things like climate change, about which we have huge amounts of statistical data, even relatively short-term predictions are educated guesses at best.
(Lest anyone mistake this for a fossil fool argument, changes often come much faster than scientists predict)
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So trying to predict sociopolitical events based on statistical modelling, even in the short term, seems like a fool's errand. It seems vanishingly unlikely that any amount of statistical information about the state of the universe in 1985 could have predicted the USSR collapsing in 1991. Let alone predicting the invasion of Ukraine by the resulting Russian Federation 2 decades later.
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The idea that statistical modelling of any kind could predict political events centuries or millennia from now seems obviously wrong. An artifact of a hubristic belief in the power of numbers, which the leading edge of science was already moving on from by the time Asimov was writing.
Classic synchronicity, I'm listening to a song right now that kind of sums this up;
It was a very common idea in science fiction at that time to think that weather could be precisely predicted or even controlled, too.
Same problem.
Chaos theory definitely lowered our expectations on some things.
You mean before scientists discovered chaos theory and the butterfly effect?
When the first Foundation stories were published in 1942, I'm pretty sure some of the foundational science behind those had already been done. The uncertainty principle, for example, had already been proposed and mathematically supported by Heisenberg in the 1920s.
But yes, deterministic physics were clearly still mainstream science in the 1950s, when Asimov's Foundation novels came out.
@raphaelkaitz
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