![]() ![]() In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally-managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov "privately" concluded that the story was his best science fiction yet written. ![]() If it were to go back then changes in thermodynamic state functions would reverse, including entropy. This means that once a spontaneous process has come to its end, it never goes back to the initial state. He placed it just higher than " The Ugly Little Boy" (September 1958) and " The Bicentennial Man" (1976). Spontaneous processes are regarded as irreversible in classical physics. "The Last Question" ranks with " Nightfall" (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Spontaneous processes are regarded as irreversible in classical physics. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably 'The Last Question'. with pre-combustion CO storage (Reverse Entropy Storage) resulting in over. This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. This project is profitable at todays carbon prices due to Entropys. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember-" at which point I interrupted to tell him it was 'The Last Question' and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. ![]() I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles. The story deals with the development of a series of computers, Multivac, and its relationships with humanity through the courses of seven historical settings, beginning on the day in 2061 that Earth becomes a planetary civilization. In each of the first six scenes, a different character presents the computer with the same question, how the threat to human existence posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" That is equivalent to asking, "Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics (used in the story as the increase of the entropy of the universe) be reversed?" Multivac's only response after much "thinking" is "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER." #Reverse entropy series# ![]()
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