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Isaac Asimov ( born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov; Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; c. January 2, 1920– April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in nine out of ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification.
Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series. Later, beginning with Foundation's Edge, he linked this distant future to the Robot and Spacer stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.
The prolific Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often provides nationalities, birth dates, and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples include Guide to Science, the three volume set Understanding Physics, Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery, as well as works on astronomy, mathematics, the Bible, William Shakespeare's writing and chemistry.
Asimov was a long-time member and vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs". He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov, a crater on the planet Mars, a Brooklyn, New York elementary school, and a literary award are named in his honor.
Asimov was born between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (near the modern border with Belarus) to Anna Rachel (Berman) Asimov and Judah Asimov, a family of Jewish millers. While his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.
The family name derives from a word for winter crops which his great-grandfather dealt, to which a patronymic suffix was added. This word is spelled 'озимые' in Russian, and 'азімыя' in Belorussian. Accordingly, his name originally was Исаак Озимов in Russian and Ісак Азімаў in Belorussian; however he was later known in Russia as Ayzek Azimov (Айзек Азимов
, a Russian Cyrillic adaptation of the American English pronunciation.
Asimov had two younger siblings; a sister, Marcia (born Manya, June 17, 1922 – April 2, 2011), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929 – August 16, 1995), who was vice-president of New York Newsday.
His family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. Since his parents always spoke Yiddish and English with him, he never learned Russian. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York City, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five and remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English. Asimov wrote of his father, "My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart", and "he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me."
His parents owned a succession of candy stores, and everyone in the family was expected to work in them. He became a naturalized U.S. Citizen in 1928 at the age of eight.
Education and career
Asimov began reading science fiction pulp magazines at a young age. His father, as a matter of principle, forbade reading the pulps, as he considered them to be trash, but Asimov persuaded him that the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, so they were educational. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen—after he discovered science fiction fandom—he was selling stories to the science fiction magazines. John W. Campbell, then editor of Astounding Science Fiction, had a strong formative influence on Asimov and eventually became a personal friend.
Asimov attended New York City public schools, including Boys High School in Brooklyn. Graduating at 15, he went on to Seth Low Junior College, a branch of Columbia University in Brooklyn designed to absorb some of the Jewish and Italian-American students who applied to Columbia College, then the institution's primary undergraduate school for men with quotas on the number of admissions from those ethnic groups. Originally a zoology major, Asimov changed his subject to chemistry after his first semester as he disapproved of "dissecting an alley cat". After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1938, Asimov finished his BS degree at University Extension (later the Columbia University School of General Studies) in 1939. When he failed to secure admission to medical school, he applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia; initially rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis, Asimov completed his MA in chemistry in 1941 and earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1948. In between, he spent three years during World War II working as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for almost nine months before receiving an honorable discharge. In the course of his brief military career, he rose to the rank of corporal on the basis of his typing skills, and narrowly avoided participating in the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.
After completing his doctorate, Asimov joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine, with which he remained associated thereafter. From 1958, this was in a non-teaching capacity, as he turned to writing full-time (his writing income had already exceeded his academic salary). Being tenured, he retained the title of associate professor, and in 1979 the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimov's personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at the university's Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gottlieb. The collection fills 464 boxes, or seventy-one meters of shelf space.
Personal life
Asimov married Gertrude Blugerman (1917, Canada–1990, Boston) on July 26, 1942. They had two children, David (b. 1951) and Robyn Joan (b. 1955). In 1970 they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to Manhattan, where he lived for the rest of his life. He immediately began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, and married her two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude in 1973.
Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In the third volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading.
Asimov was afraid of flying, only doing so twice in his entire life (once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station, and once returning home from the army base in Oahu in 1946) Consequently, he seldom traveled great distances. This phobia influenced several of his fiction works, such as the Wendell Urth mystery stories and the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. In his later years, he found he enjoyed traveling on cruise ships, and on several occasions he became part of the cruises' "entertainment", giving science-themed talks on ships such as the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2.
Asimov was an able public speaker and was a frequent fixture at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards, and was pleased to give autographs. He was of medium height, stocky, with mutton chop whiskers and a distinct New York accent. His physical dexterity was very poor. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle; however, he did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".
Asimov's wide interests included his participation in his later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and in The Wolfe Pack, a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan. He was a prominent member of the Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society having been admitted after writing an essay arguing that Professor Moriarty's work "The Dynamics of An Asteroid" involved the wilful destruction of an ancient civilized planet. (This was alluded to in the 2011 film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows when Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) asks Moriarty (Jared Harris) to autograph this work, after which Moriarty asks after the health of "the Good Doctor"; a double-entendre meaning both Dr. Watson and Isaac Asimov, whose nickname it was.) He was also a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.
In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. From 1985 until his death in 1992, he served as president of the AHA, an honorary appointment; his successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. He was also a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and earned a screen credit on Star Trek: The Motion Picture for advice he gave during production (generally, confirming to Paramount Pictures that Roddenberry's ideas were legitimate science-fictional extrapolation).
Asimov was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). The organization lists him as a fellow.
Illness and death
Asimov suffered a heart attack in 1977, and had triple bypass surgery in December 1983. When he died in New York City on April 6, 1992, his brother Stanley reported heart and kidney failure as the cause of death. He was survived by his second wife, Janet, and his children from his first marriage. Ten years after his death, Janet Asimov's edition of Asimov's autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, revealed that the myocardial and renal complications were the result of an infection by HIV, which he had contracted from a blood transfusion received during his bypass operation. Janet Asimov wrote in the epilogue of It's Been a Good Life that Asimov's doctors advised him against going public, warning that the anti-AIDS prejudice would likely extend to his family members. Asimov's family considered disclosing his condition just after his death, but the controversy that erupted the same year when Arthur Ashe announced his own HIV infection (also contracted from a blood transfusion during heart surgery) convinced them otherwise. Ten years later, after most of Asimov's doctors had died, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public.
Based on inflation, unemployment, growth weakness, and cost of capital, Goldman notes that emerging market's "macro-misery" indices have pushed back to post-financial-crisis highs.
It is hardly a surprise that macroeconomic hardship is surging since in the 15 years since the EM sovereign bonds have been liquid, levels remain extremely elevated, despite the mainstream-media's relegation of the problem.
As Bank of Mexico's Agustin Carstens warns, "we cannot rule out the event that some advanced economies run into deeper trouble again... the world economy is still in a fragile situation."
Read more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-11/emerging-market-macro-misery-back-post-crisis-highs#ixzz2hUyZ69lC
Some observations:
We owe most of the money to ourselves.
We owe a big chunk of the money — about $6 trillion — to the Federal government. So if there ever were a default (hopefully there won't be) the government would also be stiffing itself.
We owe about $5 trillion to other countries, including China.
The total debt to China is only $1.3 trillion. So we're not in hock to China as much as some people think we are.
Yes, it's a boatload of debt. But the experience of Japan, the U.S. after World War 2, and other countries, suggests that it's a manageable amount, as long as we eventually get our long-term entitlement spending under control.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/who-we-owe-federal-debt-to-2013-10#ixzz2hV7vhkBi
High-cost cities tend to have higher median incomes, which leads to the simple heuristic that, sure, it's costlier to live in San Francisco than in Akron, but the people who pay bills there make enough money that they can afford it.
In reality, yes, the median household income in metropolitan San Francisco is higher than it is in Akron (by about $30,000). But that smaller income will buy you much, much more in Ohio. To be more specific, if you make the median income in Akron – a good proxy for a spot in the local middle class – 86 percent of the homes on the market there this month are likely within your budget.
If you're middle-class in San Francisco, on the other hand, that figure is just 14 percent. Your money will buy you no more than 1,000 square feet on average. That property likely isn't located where you'd like to live. And the options available to you on the market are even fewer than they were just a year ago, according to data crunched by Trulia. To frame this another way, the median income in metro San Francisco is about 60 percent higher than it is in Akron. But the median for-sale housing price per square foot today is about 700 percent higher.
The gulf between those two numbers means that the most expensive U.S. cities aren't just unaffordable for the average American middle-class family; they're unaffordable to the relatively well-off middle class by local standards, too.
In 1964, famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov ventured a guess at what you might find if you set foot inside the 2014 World’s Fair. Using his gift for envisioning future technology, Asimov’s predictions from 50 years out are both stunningly accurate and perhaps a little bit depressing. Here’s a look at what he got right.
“One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.”
“Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee.”
“Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing.”
“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course.”
“Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘Robot-brains.’”
“There will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface.”
“By 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.”
“For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections.”
“In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000.”
“Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth.”
“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone.”
“In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World’s Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen.”
“Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process.”
“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.”
“The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.”
“Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom.”
“The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”
“Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!”
It’s worth noting that, while quite impressive, Asimov didn’t get everything right. 2014 will most surely come and go without “jets of compressed air [that] will lift land vehicles off the highways.” He also predicted that the entire East Coast from Boston to Washington would merge into one large mega city, which seems unlikely at this point in time. But perhaps the most telling (and disheartening) is Asimov’s inaccurate notion that we’d even have a World’s Fair in 2014. But still, pretty good!
UNFORTUNATELY, ASIMOV WAS ASSUMING GROWING EQUALITY OF WEALTH...WHICH HAS BEEN TOTALLY SABOTAGED AT PRESENT....BUT I LIVE IN HOPE THAT WHAT GOES AROUND, WILL COME AROUND, AND KARMA WILL BALANCE THE SCALES.
At last look, no one from the CME knew who that was.
Any one know how JP Morgan is paying its lawyer bills?
Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe which combines history, sociology, etc., and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. It was first introduced in the five short stories (1942–1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 novel Foundation
Axioms
Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. (Physicists know this as the Kinetic theory.) Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms:
There is a third underlying axiom of Psychohistory, which is trivial and thus not stated by Seldon in his Plan:
Psychohistory has one basic, underlying limitation which Asimov postulated for the first time on literally the last page of the final book in the Foundation series: psychohistory only functions in a galaxy populated only by humans. In Asimov's Foundation series, humans form the only sentient race that developed in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Seldon developed psychohistory to predict the actions of large groups of humans. Even robots technically fall under the umbrella of psychohistory, because humans built them, and they thus represent more or less a human "action", or at least, possess a thought-framework similar enough to that of their human creators that psychohistory can predict their actions. However, psychohistory cannot predict the actions of a sentient alien race; their psychology may differ so much from that of humans that normal psychohistory cannot understand or predict their actions.
The end of the series offered two possibilities:
Some literary critics have described Asimov's psychohistory as a reformulation, either for better or worse, of Karl Marx's theory of history (historical materialism), though Asimov denied any direct influence. Arguably, Asimov's psychohistory departs significantly from Marx's general theory of history based on modes of production (as distinct from Marx's model of the capitalist economy, where "natural laws" work themselves out with "iron necessity"
in that psychohistory is predictive (if only in the sense of involving precisely stated probabilities), and in that psychohistory is extrapolated from individual psychology and even from physics. Psychohistory also has echoes of modernization theory and of work in the social sciences that by the 1960s would lead to attempts at large-scale social prediction and control such as Project Camelot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29
Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels— by Mark Cole —
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cole_11_12/
—Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
Robots. That’s what most people think of first when they think of Isaac Asimov—and certainly, his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics are among the best he wrote. But he also came up with another unique and equally memorable science fiction concept: psychohistory.
Psychohistory (originally hyphenated as “psycho-history”) first appeared in the short stories Asimov would later collect in his episodic novel Foundation. Set in a distant future, the book details a vast, galactic empire which has controlled thousands of inhabited worlds for 12,000 years. The empire is on the verge of breakdown. However, very few people have realized this, primarily those working with the great mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon’s mathematical models have shown conclusively that the Empire will collapse within a few hundred years, followed by a 30,000 year dark age before civilization is rebuilt.
Seldon’s great accomplishment was his reinvention of the discipline of psychohistory. What had been little more than a set of vague axioms became, under his leadership, a profound statistical science, capable of charting the rise and fall of civilizations—and even, Seldon argued, of guiding the course of civilization so that the 30,000 years of darkness could be reduced to a mere millennium.
The underlying logic of psychohistory resembles Boyle’s gas law: The molecules in a gas move in a purely random way, and yet, collectively, that random behavior become predictable. So if you get enough people together (and Asimov very carefully avoided any suggestion of just how many), you could reduce the apparently random actions of billions of human beings to a set of physical laws describing the behavior of civilizations. That number, the Seldon constant, was extremely high—high enough that it could only be found in the vastness of the Galactic Empire.
On the surface this sounds fairly plausible, even if the degree of accuracy Seldon claimed for his work doesn’t. Yet it is far from clear that Asimov believes in his own invention. As in his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics, Foundation works because of the tension between the turn of events in the plot and whether they will lead to the next scheduled “Seldon Crisis.” Will the plan succeed, or will it fail?
In fact, the plan does fail by the end of the second novel, although this happens only because of an event which no one could have predicted: the rise of a mutant leader with enormous mental powers.
Whether he believed in psychohistory or not, Asimov was not alone in suggesting that a scientific approach to history would allow us to predict future trends.
Karl Marx’s notion of historical materialism was one of the first attempts at a scientific approach to history. In his view, the motor driving all of history was the means of production. As new technologies and methods changed how people produced the things they needed, he argued, this changed all of society. This historical progression would lead inevitably through a series of necessary steps towards the ultimate goal of history: socialism.
While many socialist thinkers have tinkered with Marx’s basic formulation, most versions start with what is called “primitive communism” (in prehistoric tribal societies), followed by ancient society, feudalism, and finally capitalism. Each one of these stages represents a different way in which people produced the goods they needed to survive—and a different way of living.
It should be noted, however, that, despite the term “scientific,” Marx’s system is not empirical but deduced from his own first principles.
Many of Asimov’s readers have in fact suggested that Marx was one of the major influences on psychohistory. However, Marx’s historical materialism bears little resemblance to Asimov’s conception. Seldon’s system appears to include far more than the purely economic factors Marx would allow—with the second crisis leading to the establishment of what amounts to a religion. What is far more important, though, is that Marx pictures a clear, evolutionary progress, each stage representing a more advanced society than the last, whereas Hari Seldon’s science predicts not a progression, but the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations—both development and decay. Psychohistory more closely resembles the work of a handful of 20th-century thinkers who dared to reject the standard, evolutionary view of society: most notably, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin.
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There is even a real-world discipline that calls itself psychohistory, although it bears little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s version.
In the real world, psychohistory is an attempt to apply psychology to history, to gain a greater understanding of what caused past events. It tends to focus on issues related to childhood—and most notably, questions of incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Some psychohistorians hope that by perfecting our methods of rearing children, we might eliminate war and international hatreds. This is about as close to Asimov as it gets.
Psychohistory has never quite emerged from its academic shantytown and remains controversial. There are no departments of psychohistory, even if a few colleges do have courses in it. Many of their fellow historians have questioned their vast grab-bag of assorted methods and think that their reconstructions of past historical figures involve a lot of guesswork. Others question whether it should be considered a separate discipline at all, as mainstream historians have long attempted to explore psychological motivations.
One aspect of the real psychohistory, however, points in a very different direction—towards a forgotten understanding of history that might have more bearing on Hari Seldon’s story than Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, or Sorokin. For it does not always look at mass psychology, and cultural analysis, but it also attempts to understand the psychological motivations of historic individuals.
While the image of history as an ever upward, evolutionary process may have been the orthodox belief at the time of Spengler, it had itself replaced an even older view. Rather than seeing history in terms of sweeping trends, this older view held that it was the choices made by individuals which have shaped history. It is a view which has never quite died, finding support at the time from a number of mostly Catholic scholars, notably Christopher Dawson, Hilaire Belloc, and Sir Herbert Butterfield.
Despite all of Hari Seldon’s talk of grand historical trends and mathematical predictions, the irony is that the new future he crafts is ultimately the result of the actions of a single man: Hari Seldon.
It is his refinement of the science of psychohistory, his predictions, his establishment of the Seldon institute, and the shadowy Second Institute that reshape history. Even though he may have made his choices based on mathematical models, they are still his choices. Without them, the history of the galaxy would have looked quite different.
Whether or not Isaac Asimov believed that psychohistory was possible, the story of Hari Seldon is not of one of randomness and blind forces, determinism, and the laws of science, but of a single remarkable man whose actions reshape the history of the galaxy.
One does have to wonder, however, if Dr. Asimov ever noticed this.
IF I HAD TO NOMINATE A SINGLE REMARKABLE MAN WHOSE ACTIONS SHAPED HISTORY, ASIMOV WOULD BE ON THE SHORT LIST.
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