XPost: alt.fan.tolkien, rec.arts.books.tolkien, alt.books.cs-lewis   
   From: dthierbach@usenet.arcornews.de   
      
   Öjevind Lång  wrote:   
   > "Troels Forchhammer"  skrev i meddelandet   
   >> Öjevind Lång  spoke these staves:   
      
   > One idea that definitely didn't make sense even at the time was that   
   > one could foresee the future if one only assembled enough facts   
   > ("psychohistory").   
      
   I always imagined that similar to thermodynamics: You have lots of   
   particles moving completely randomly, but nevertheless one can assign   
   properties to the complete ensemble like pressure or temperature which   
   obey rather strict laws.   
      
   > That is utter rubbish, of course. How does one decide   
   > which facts are relevant, and how are they to be processed?   
   > And when you have assembled and analysed the data from one single   
   > planet, they would already be obsolete or proved to be incorrect.   
      
   How do you decide which "facts" about gas molecules are relevant if   
   you want to measure the pressure? :-) And just when you've measured   
   the velocity of this or that molecule, it bounces and the measurement   
   becomes obsolete...   
      
   BTW, Asimov actually showed in the Foundation series that in the long   
   run, the laws don't hold -- a single individual can have enough   
   influence to let the course of events take a different turn.   
   Today we'd call that "chaotic behaviour", I guess.   
      
   In the same way, most of his robots stories are actually about   
   situations where the three laws *fail* to make a robot behave properly.   
      
   - Dirk   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)