Foundation: The Anomaly

Hi Quinn,it´s guy here

one part of the mule story that i thought was really interesting and would like to see explored more is how everyone was SO SURE that Seldon's next message would address the Mule, but was about a completely different crisis that their predicted future had veered off from. i thought it highlighted the passivity of a society that believes that the future can't hold any real surprises.

An important thing to consider re: the science and “chaos theory”: At the time FOUNDATION was written, what we now think of as chaos theory (nondeterminism of nonlinear systems) wasn’t really a thing. But there WAS a related concept in physics which Asimov (as a trained chemist) certainly WOULD have known about: STATISTICAL MECHANICS. What psychohistory is, speaking from a physics background, is really a “statistical mechanics for people”. In thermodynamics we have been able to explain the transfer of heat and flow in gases and fluids for many decades, long before the advent of chaos theory. We can do this without knowing how any single gas or fluid molecule is moving or acting. But statistical mechanics is the mathematics of how MASSIVE numbers of idealized molecules will behave in response to stimuli such as heat, and it’s incredibly accurate at predicting thermodynamic behavior, again, without saying one damn thing about how any *individual* atom or molecule behaves. Asimov clearly patterened psychohistory on statistcal mechanics — it can’t say anything about how an individual person acts, but can quite accurately predict how mass numbers behave in the aggregate. In this sense, the Mule acts something like the imaginary “Maxwell’s Demon”, like moving atoms in a fluid from low density to high, rather than in the reverse, which is normal. The laws of statisical mechanics wouldn’t predict the result if you have a Maxwell’s Demon pusing atoms around in the gas in contravention of how the normal laws of physics work.

Foundation is like a heist movie: Hari Seldon sets up the absolutely perfect plan to break the empire and rebuild it 1000 years later. The plan starts, everything is perfect until something goes terribly wrong, oh no - camera cuts to Hari having already thought about something going wrong and having a backup team in place from the start.

So true. Paul = "Be careful what you wish for". The Mule = "One bite of one apple does not make you Omniscient".

Btw, just want to mention that I love your intro. Whenever I hear it my brain switches from "doomscrolling" mode to "pay attention because something really cool is going to be discussed" mode

I always liked how the characters had to figure out how to overcome the Mule and keep psychohistory on track.

A new video on Foundation, what a great day!!!

I had thought that the Mule was a demonstration of the limits of Psycho-history, rather that a disruption of the plan.

Feels like Foundation treats chaos as an outlier, a problem to be solved in pursuit of perfect determinism. Like a rock thrown into a pond, the ripple will eventually fade. Whereas Dune seems to see the Chaos as an inherent internal part of the system. It acknowledges the infinite interplay of vibrations within the pond and how no matter how hard you try, you'll never have a truly still pond. Given enough time those miniscule ripples will combine to become a tidal wave.