Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Science has made a myriad of calculated prophecies, predicting its own rapid progression and ultimate escalation to supremacy above all other knowledge. The "Foundation Trilogy" by Isaac Asimov is set at a future time, when the divination of science has proved to be true and man has conquered the galaxy with its help. The Julactic Empire, a society of a million human worlds, is spread through out the vast nothingness of the Milky Way, filling its every crevice with the glories of humanity. However, after twelve thousand years of peaceful prosperity, a mathematician in the name of Hari Seldon, shatters the Empire's allusion of social perfection with his psycho-historic calculations.

Psychohistory is a branch of mathematics with which the history of the future can be plotted, by studying human reactions to social and economic stimuli. While an individual human being is too erratic for its future behavior pattern to be determined, psychohistory can accurately predict the behavior of a large mass of people, depending on a statistical order that all seemingly sporadic mobs follow. With this new branch of science, Hari Seldon prophesizes the fall of the Julactic Empire within five hundred years and thirty thousand years of following barbarism after which a Second Empire will rise.

According to his calculations, the fall is inevitable but the span of the subsequent Dark Age is not. With the aim of saving a countless generation of humans from suffering, Seldon concocts a plan to assure the rise of the Second Empire within a thousand years, instead of thirty thousand. He sets up two Foundations at two ends of the Galaxy. The First Foundation, situated at the periphery of the Milky Way, is a world of "encyclopedists"- a group of physical scientists appointed by Seldon to make a record of all knowledge, so as to protect it from the vortex of the Fall.

Within two centuries, the First Foundation becomes the most powerful state in the Galaxy, protected and nurtured by the dead hand of Hari Seldon. After a few psycho-historically planned and controlled victories, the Foundationers recede into inertia and over confidence. They become eluded by their belief that no matter what they do or fail to do, they will still ultimately rule the Galaxy. After all, psycho-history says so... but not one of them were psycho-historians. This misguided psycho- historic superstition sets up a scientific priesthood,