Hari Seldon lied to you. Truth really is, as they say, stranger and more convoluted than fiction. History will never be a science, because the interactions of humanity, like a turbulent flow, are chaotic*. One thing leads to another, small causes have large effects, and the effects are not always predictable from the cause.
Consider, for an example, the effects on society of one simple invention: the spinning wheel. In the middle ages, cloth was made from hand-spun flax. Since hand spinning to make cloth is a slow and labor-intensive process; the product was necessarily an expensive item. Sometime in the mid thirteenth century, however, the spinning wheel, invented in China, was introduced in Europe. The spinning wheel (and, later, the textile mill) made cloth common, and cheap.
Cheap cloth led to the existence of something new: rags. When cloth was expensive, there was no such thing as rags--clothes were repaired and used until they had none of the original material left.
Paper is a relatively new invention. Before paper, books were made from parchment. You make parchment from the skin of a lamb. First it is soaked in water and lime to remove the hair, then stretched and dried, and finally rubbed smooth (by hand) with pumice. Making a single vellum Bible in the middle ages required the skins of two to three hundred lambs. No wonder that books were rare and precious!
With the introduction of rag-stock, suddenly there was cheap and high-quality paper. Without cheap paper, there was little point in having a printing press: what point is there in mass-production of books if each one requires two hundred lamb-skins? But with the introduction of rag-stock paper, invention of the printing press swiftly followed.
Cheap paper lead to literacy. Obviously, it was pointless to have a literate population when books were rare and expensive And so, we can continue, the printing press led to newspapers (imagine! Going to all that trouble of printing up something that you throw away tomorrow!) But newspapers (and their earlier incarnation, broadsides), led to the possibility of democracy. Who could even have thought of having the "people" govern, when the only way to be well informed was to have an extensive retinue of advisors and courtiers? With books and newspapers, any common farmer could be informed at a level that once kings and scholars would have envied.
And thus, the necessary corollary of democracy: freedom of the press.
Another product of the spinning wheel was Mr. Scott. That's right, the crusty chief engineer on the old Star Trek.
Consider the rise of civilization in the north--and by "north," I mean north of Italy: Germany, Britain--when staying warm in the winter means wearing furs. But there is a limited amount of fur that local trappers and farmers can provide, not enough to sustain large populations and cities. The infant death rate was over 50%. It's no coincidence that early civilizations--from Babylon right up through through Rome--were in the south.
Cheap cloth (along with effective fireplaces) changed all that. The resultant northern population explosion had an unexpected consequence: a virtually complete deforestation of Britain. All those people wanted to keep warm indoors, and cut down all the trees for firewood. That led to the immediate, and desperate, demand for an alternate fuel.
The answer was coal. By a stroke of good fortune, coal was plentiful in Britain. The shallow, easy-to-dig coal was quickly found and used up. The voracious demand for heating coal to warm a burgeoning population resulted in the digging of ever deeper coal mines, in northern Britain, Wales, and Scotland. But water runs downhill, and Britain has a wet climate. You have to keep pumping that water out of the mines! This is why the steam engine was invented and improved--not to make locomotives (which came around much later), but to run the pumps to keep coal mines dry. (Heck, the Greeks knew about the steam engine;** they just didn't need to pump coal mines dry, since their climate was moderately warm anyway.) Coal and steam, a perfect partnership: steam engines allow deep coal seams to be mined, and coal runs the steam engines. And, of course, once you have steam engines, next comes thermodynamics, and--bingo!--the whole industrial revolution falls in your lap: railroads and steamships, then automobiles and airplanes, finally atomic bombs and moon rockets.
--and that, the industrial revolution plus the printing press and cheap paper, led to us the science fiction community--
It's almost frightening, really, on what a slender and improbable chain of events our civilization rests.
Not only did the the spinning wheel give us democracy, it also gave us communism. The evils that incited Karl Marx's righteous indignation were the excesses of the industrial revolution: the ten-hour-plus work day in the textile mill, child labor... the same sorts of things graphically described by that contemporary chronicler of the industrial revolution, Charles Dickens. --And, it is interesting to note, most of the things Marx advocated, such as public education, labor unions, and the eight-hour workday, have been implemented in all the industrialized nations. The fight against communism was over long ago: the communists won.
The industrial revolution gave us the world war, the first war in which chemical technology was a major player. The war demanded trucks and airplanes, and trucks and airplanes demanded rubber tires, so naturally the good guys--us--embargoed access to the Malaysian rubber plantations to the Germans. But the Germans, at the time, were the best chemists in the world. They learned to make synthetic rubber--latex--in a hurry.
Latex gave us another new invention, the cheap and reliable rubber condom. In one blow it removed the danger of venereal disease and pregnancy, and that led, in a generation or two, directly to the sexual revolution***.
The condom itself was quickly antiquated by the pill and penicillin. But that led to the spread of AIDS into the industrialized world. And, I think, not even Hari Seldon would be willing to guess where that will lead.
Oh, yes-- Scotty? Well, recall the British coal mines in Scotland. Scotland, of course, is where they had to have the steam engineers, to make and improve and keep the steam engines running. And so for centuries the best engineers were Scotsmen. Thus, the legend of the Scottish engineer persisted until it solidified into a stereotype. And so, for the super-engineer of the Federation's greatest starship, who else could possibly do but an intrepid Scotsman?
From the spinning wheel to the sexual revolution and the U.S.S. Enterprise: our technology has changed our lives in ways that we never would have predicted, changed our culture and our governments, and in a very real sense made us into what we are. Quite a twisted trail.
If it were science fiction, I'm not sure I'd believe it.
*In the technical sense of the word "chaos," a form of deterministic unpredictability.
**They used them for magic tricks, like opening up temple doors on cue, and such.
***Robert Heinlein makes an interesting argument, in Expanded Universe, that the cause of the sexual revolution was the Model T Ford. With the advent of cheap cars, young couples could do their courting away from the eyes of mom and dad. But I think that the latex condom had a lot more to do with it: when sex has a distinct probability of leading to pregnancy, there's a good reason for a strict moral code restricting sex to married couples.
After this one was published, Asimov's forwarded to me a letter that took me to task for vastly oversimplifying the history of weaving technology. I didn't even know that there were people interested in the history of weaving technology.
Now I know.