Psychohistory

Via Prometheus6, I have heard that one of my favorate scifi epics may be coming to the big screen. Foundation is an centuries spanning "future history" of a galactic empire, its fall, and the attempts of many groups to birth a new, better empire from the ashes.

These stories were written over the span of 50 years, and you can see in Isaac Asimov's style the perspectives and foci of a young versus an old man. 

I always enjoy clever protagonists and plot twists, and as a younger reader I enjoyed the way that in the stories cold calculations drafted decades previously could defeat brute force in the present. (in some ways, this is very similar to Obama's defeat of McCain: polished strategic planning against harsh, day-to-day snap politics.)

As an older man I have read his stories with an eye to his descriptions of psychohistory, the science used to shape historical forces decades before they happen. This discipline assumes that a galaxy full of people can provide enough statistical significance to treat society as a physical object with governing "physical" laws of behavior. 

I do not know how much I have been influenced by asimov, but I am actually working on ideas that bear some resemblance to psychohistory. I am using them not to save an empire but for more practical purposes, including marketing and valuation.