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."
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