The grand, fictional social science framework from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, proposing that the future of galactic civilizations can be predicted with mathematical certainty through the analysis of mass human behavior. The core axiom is that while individual actions are random, the behavior of very large populations is statistically predictable, much like the physics of gases. This theory posits that a sufficiently advanced mathematical model could forecast societal collapse, dark ages, and recoveries millennia in advance, allowing a small, knowledgeable elite to guide history with minimal, precisely calculated interventions. It's history as a deterministic physics problem, where humanity is the equation.
Example: "Our corporate strategy team thinks they're using Psychohistory Theory. They feed social media sentiment, commodity prices, and birth rates into a model that spits out a 78% probability of a 'cultural fatigue event' in our key demographic by Q4. They're not predicting the fall of the Galactic Empire, but they did buy all the ad space for mindfulness apps six months before the burnout wave hit. They guide markets the way Hari Seldon guided millennia."
by Abzunammu February 2, 2026
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