"Isaac Asimov - Second Found" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

14. ANXIETY

15. THROUGH THE GRID

16. BEGINNING OF WAR

17. WAR

18. GHOST OF A WORLD

19. END OF WAR

20. "I KNOW ..."

21. THE ANSWER THAT SATISFIED

22. THE ANSWER THAT WAS TRUE

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Prologue

The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It
had included all the planets of the Galaxy in a centralized rule, sometimes
tyrannical, sometimes benevolent, always orderly. Human beings had
forgotten that any other form of existence could be.

All except Hari Seldon.

Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. It was he who
brought the science of psycho-history to its full development.
Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology, it was the science of
human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.

The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human
mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the
greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human
masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the
Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions.

It was Seldon, then, who foresaw, against all common sense and popular
belief, that the brilliant Empire which seemed so strong was in a state of
irremediable decay and decline. He foresaw (or he solved his equations and
interpreted its symbols, which amounts to the same thing) that left to
itself, the Galaxy would pass through a thirty thousand year period of
misery and anarchy before a unified government would rise once more.

He set about to remedy the situation, to bring about a state of affairs
that would restore peace and civilization in a single thousand of years.
Carefully, he set up two colonies of scientists that he called