Fysiker försöker sig på framtidsforskning

Enligt Guardian så försöker fysiker använda matematiska modeller för att förutsäga vad som händer i samhället.

Unlikely as it might sound, there are signs that aspects of social behaviour follow mathematical laws akin to those obeyed by insensate matter in the physical sciences.

Den som läst Asimovs Stiftelseböcker lär väl tänka på psykohistoria.
Psychohistory was also the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov used the analogy of a gas - In a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. Asimov applied this concept to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two postulates: that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large and that they should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses. [från Wikipedia]

Asimov gör en analogi med gaser, i Guardian lika så, Some traffic physicists argue that traffic exists in three distinct states: free flow, congested flow and jams. These are analogous to the gas, liquid and solid states of matter