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and, therefore, unpredictable. What I have done, however, is to show that, in studying human society, it is possible to choose a starting point and to make appropriate assumptions that will suppress the chaos. That will make it possible to predict the future, not in full detail, of course, but in broad sweeps; not with certainty, but with calculable probabilities."
Seldon then compares the problem of psychohistory with the way in which scientists deal with subatomic particles, complicated by the added factor of the human mind. His mathematical analysis implies that order must underlie everything but does not give any hint as to how this order might be found, and he refers to twenty-five million worlds, each having a billion or more inhabitants.
Seldon later explains to Dors that his field of specialization is the mathematical analysis of social structure, and that psychohistory should have been called "psychsociology," but he justifies his choice with the comment that the second term was "too ugly a word" and he may have known, instinctively, that a knowledge of history was necessary. As they are setting out for Mycogen, Seldon describes the situation of psychohistory to Hummin and Dors, beginning with the problems of simulating complex phenomena: "the Universe as a whole, in its full complexity, cannot be represented by any simulation smaller than itself. . . . But at what level of complexity does simulation cease to be possible. Well, what I have shown, making use of a mathematical technique first invented in this past century . . . our Galactic society falls short of that mark. It can be represented by a simulation simpler than itself."
In rescuing Seldon and Dors from Sunmaster Fourteen, Hummin defines psychohistory as "the possibility of organizing the natural laws of society . . . in such a way as to make it possible to anticipate the future with a substantial degree of probability." And in Dahl, Seldon tells Dors that he developed psychohistory from his Ph.D. problem, the mathematics of turbulence; and later in Dahl he tells a newsman that "What I have done is to prove that it is possible to choose starting conditions from which historical forecasting does not descend into chaotic conditions, but can become predictable within limits. However, what those starting conditions might be I do not know, nor am I sure that those conditions can be found by any one person or by any number of people in a finite length of time."
By the end of Prelude . . . Seldon has moved from complete skepticism about the practicability of psychohistory to a belief in its possibility, as a result of his quest through Trantor. He can learn from the study of a

 
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