THE FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE WAS FALLING. IT HAD BEEN DECAYING and breaking down for centuries and only one man fully¹ realized that fact.
 
                He was Hari Seldom the last great scientist of the First Empire, and it was he who perfected psychohistory--the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.
 
                The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically³. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of all the inhabited millions of worlds of the Galaxy⁴.
 
                Seldon’s equations told him that, left to itself, the Empire would fall and that. thirty thousand years of human misery⁵ and agony would elapse before a Second Empire would arise from the ruins. And yet, if one could adjust some of the conditions that existed, that Interregnum could be decreased to a single millennium--just one thousand years.
 
                It was to insure this that Seldon set up two colonies of scientists that he called “Foundations.” With deliberate intention, he set them up “at opposite ends of the Galaxy.” The First Foundation, which centered on physical science, was set up in the fuel daylight of publicity⁶. The existence of the other, the Second Foundation, a world of psychohistorical and “mentalic” scientists, was drowned in silence.
 
                InThe Foundation Trilogy , the story of the first four centuries of the Interregnum is told. The First Foundation (commonly known as simply “The Foundation,” since the existence of another was unknown to almost all) began as a small community lost in the emptiness of the Outer

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