Some Such Name
12.09.2004
  The Age Of Hari Seldon
In an earlier post I'd said that opinion flow in the US exit polls could have been a unique instance of the The Doppler Effect, a law of physics. Following the same path, Paul Levy has written a fairly nice piece, but obfuscated by unnecessary scientific jargon about how Quantum Physics effects the polls:

What Wheeler is pointing out through the delayed choice experiment, though, is that the past doesn’t actually exist in a solid and objective way that causes or determines our present moment experience like is imagined by classical physics. Rather, he is saying our situation is just the opposite. He is saying that by the way we observe in this present moment we actually reach back into time and create the past. It is not just the future that’s undetermined, but the past as well; just as there are ‘probable’ futures there are ‘probable’ pasts. Our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.

The other thing to observe with how Search has changed the nature of news, is that we now have all the information of the past and present available at hand simultaneously, so the only remaining task for us would be to speculate about the future! You too can get a feel of the times to come by playing this game I play, a stockmarket of ideas.

As you might already know, Psychohistory is a fictional science created by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series, "which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people, such as the Galactic Empire."
 
Comments:
The other thing to observe with how Search has changed the nature of news, is that we now have all the information of the past and present available at hand simultaneously, so the only remaining task for us would be to speculate about the future!

Only true if you assume that all past and present information you retrieve is correct, which it probably isn't.
 
Only true if you assume that all past and present information you retrieve is correct, which it probably isn't.By "correct", I assume, Dear Reader, you mean true of verifiable. I don't agree with that notion of history. Pierre Nora (1984) wrote that: Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and is in permanent evolution. It is subjects to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unaware of it's successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latent for long periods, then suddenly revives. History is always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory always belongs to our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.
 
That's the sense of history I thought your original remark missed! :)
 
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams

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What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick, Gwen Lee (Editor), Doris Elaine Sauter (Editor), Tim Powers

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A Clockwork Orange (Norton Paperback Fiction) by Anthony Burgess

Dune (Dune Chronicles, Book 1) by Frank Herbert

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