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Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's ''Foundation'' universe which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. It was first introduced in the five short stories (1942–1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 novel ''Foundation''. ==Axioms== Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. (Physicists know this as the Kinetic theory.) Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms: * that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large * that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses There is a third underlying axiom of Psychohistory, which is trivial and thus not stated by Seldon in his Plan: * that Human Beings are the only sentient intelligence in the Galaxy. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Psychohistory (fictional)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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