A mathematician explains what Foundation gets right about predicting the future

Apple TV+'s Foundation adaptation doesn't have much in common with Isaac Asimov's groundbreaking science fiction series by the same name. But both are premised on the notion that math can be used to predict the future. And in this distant version of humanity's future, renowned mathematician Hari Seldon has a rather dire prediction: humanity's vast, 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire is on the brink of collapse. After the fall, civilization will be plunged into millenniums of chaos.

Hari Seldon's field of mathematical future casting, known as psychohistory, isn't real. But Asimov was prescient to think that people would one day wield math to make detailed predictions about the future, from economists who forecast the rise and fall of markets to climate scientists whose models predict temperatures and weather patterns in the decades to come. Some scientists are even using equations that describe collective human behavior to predict, and try to prevent, political uprisings, famine, and war — goals not unlike those of Seldon's psychohistory.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, the director of the New England Complex Systems Institute, is one of them. Since the 1980s, Bar-Yam has been at the forefront of developing and advancing the field of complex systems science, which uses math to describe social, economic, and technological systems with the aim of solving real-world problems. In recent years, Bar-Yam has used this specialized branch of mathematics to predict the Arab Spring before it happened, advise governments on how to respond to pandemics, and explain why the U.S. is increasingly ungovernable.

With the final episode of Foundation airing next week, The Science of Fiction spoke with Bar-Yam about what Asimov's psychohistory got right, what political revolutions have in common with boiling water, and why Star Trek-style Federations are more robust than Foundation-style Empires.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.