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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Psychohistory: Isaac Asimov and guiding the future
Description: 100 years on from Isaac Asimov's birth, Matthew Sweet looks at one of the bigger ideas contained in some of his 500 books; Psychohistory. The idea, from Asimov's Foundation series, was that rather like the behaviour of a gas could be reduced to statistical probabilities of the behaviour of billions of molecules, so the history of billions of human beings across the fictional galactic empire could be predicted through a few laws he called 'Psychohistory'. The idea inspired many to think that social sciences and economics can really be reduced to some sort of idealized set of...