This is really exciting for many reasons, in large part because (despite Asimov’s...many...issues) FOUNDATION was one of the sci fi series I truly geeked out on as a kid, and helped inspire my love of science. https://twitter.com/saladinahmed/status/1275145474845085696

As a young teenager, I dreamed about being able to make psychohistory.

As a young adult, I discovered that the underpinnings of psychohistory are basically the underpinnings of statistical mechanics in physics.

The basic idea behind a lot of stat mech is that you don’t need to know how individual trajectories of molecules go; they are random and unpredictable, but in the aggregate, the randomness cancels itself out.

I don’t think I was disappointed when I discovered that the basis of psychohistory is empirically false, and based on science that was not well-understood at the time Asimov wrote Foundation.

Randomness in the aggregate cancels out, but randomness about any particular trajectory multiplies. This is the stuff of chaos theory, and later complexity theory.

History is composed of wobbles and wibbles, and individual action accumulates in ways that we cannot predict.

You never know when individual action will push history one way or the other; what you do always matters.

You’ve probably heard the Jurassic Park-famous “butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park and it causes a hurricane” comment, and this is...really not an accurate statement of causation.

It’s a statement about rounding and the prediction of complex things.

Here’s an explanation of the scientific work that this statement comes from, for those who want to read the long version. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/02/butterfly-effect-is-not-what-you-think-it-is/

Long story short: Lorenz was running a computer program to predict the weather. This was back in the day when everything ran on punch cards and computers were the size of trucks.

So he wrote down the inputs at some middle point in the run, and reran the inputs. The numbers were slightly different—and by “slightly” it was “butterfly flapping its wings” different.

The results of those two trajectories diverged wildly.

In any event, Asimov’s Foundation should be best understood as an alternate physical universe in which those phenomenon governed by complexity theory are rare events.

It’s not our universe.

But at the point when I was a freshman in college, thinking I hated science, and deeply depressed, the thing that pulled me out of my depression and into a degree in mathematics and chemistry, was discovering how Foundation was impossibly wrong.

Asimov...was truly not a great person.

But Foundation is meaningful to me, and it is delightful to hope that it will be transformed into a more inclusive vision.

Also, since the Second Foundation is had very cool miniature computers, it is FREAKING AWESOME that Apple is making this show.

All that being said, if Asimov were alive today, he would need to be banned from every fucking conference on the planet as a serial sexual harasser.