Asimov's Foundation Series: Psychohistory

I have recently finished the Issac Asimov science fiction series "Foundation." I will explain the major "big idea" that drives the series: Psychohistory.

In a way, the idea of psychohistory is inaptly named, because it has more to do with sociology than psychology. Perhaps Asimov should have called it sociohistory, but no matter. Psychohistory doesn't exist yet, but conceptually it is a field that could exist. The idea is as follows: groups of people behave in certain predictable ways. In sociology we already have certain predictive principles, though not reliable. Asimov bets that in the far future, our own social studies will become more accurate until we are able to find probable predictions for group behavior. One of the reasonings behind this is that though individuals can make an impact on a small scale, as population goes up the group dynamic falls under more and more predictive power in the same way that individual particles fall under laws of gas dynamics when they increase to a certain number. The population of an entire universe would be sufficient to start finding predictable patterns in overall behavior and to start generalizing group dynamics into mathematical probablities. This could be highly accurate, but it would never be an exact science: it would be more like predicting the weather, where as time continues the ability to predict events becomes increasingly difficult.

This was Asimov's starting point, and the 5-novel series is both a melodrama following the progression of a society engineered by Hari Seldon to eventually establish a Galactic Empire, and a discussion on whether it is indeed possible to predict and control the path of a culture. Asimov's ultimate view is that extraordinary individuals will always be able to make large impacts on group behavior, so that free will can still override circumstance. This is not to say that we won't be able to predict or manipulate with increasing accuracy the behavior of human society: simply that it is impossible to completely control because, like the weather, there'll always be things that people can't anticipate.