Social Inertia

by Sigma6 on 12 July 2007

An old classic with powerful ideas. Asimov develops Psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that deals with predicting social and cultural behaviors and trends far into the future. It's application is to a galactic civilization that is crumbling but doesn't know it. He sets up a special body designed to shorten the coming dark ages from 30 to 12 millenia. There is a second, secret, body, well versed in Psychohistory, that guides certain events so that the predictions unfold as calculated. But even the best laid plans ... Broad in scope and very well thought out. I loved the idea of social inertia - analogous to physical inertia. Newton's Laws of Motion applied to social movement.