Reversal of Causality

[stoutfellow]

I'm currently reading Asimov's Foundation and Earth, and just ran across a bit which amuses me. Two characters are AsYouKnowBobbing; one says

"The story is - if you want tradition - that Hari Seldon devised psychohistory by modeling it upon the kinetic theory of gases. Each atom or molecule in a gas moves randomly so that we can't know the position or velocity of any one of them. Nevertheless, using statistics, we can work out the rules governing their overall behavior with great precision. In the same way, Seldon intended to work out the overall behavior of human societies even though the solutions would not apply to the behavior of individual human beings."

What makes this funny, to me, is that Boltzmann and Maxwell developed the theory of statistical dynamics for gases after reading the work of Henry Buckle on the use of statistics in the study of societies.... (Buckle was a leading historian of his era.) Statistics was born in the social sciences; its use in the physical sciences came decades later.