The Science of History

Beginning as a series of short stories in the 1940s and later collected into a novel, Foundation introduces psychohistory — a fictional science that uses mathematics to predict the behavior of large populations. Hari Seldon foresees the Galactic Empire's collapse and creates a foundation to shorten the coming dark age from thirty thousand years to one thousand.

The core insight is elegant: individual actions are unpredictable, but mass behavior follows calculable statistical patterns — just as you cannot predict where a single gas molecule will go, but you can predict the behavior of a trillion molecules with precision.