"And Trantor itself is a bigger puzzle than almost any world. According to the records, it had a fairly normal weather pattern when it was first settled. Then, as the population grew and urbanization spread, more energy was used and more heat was discharged into the atmosphere. The ice cover contracted, the cloud layer thickened, and the weather got lousier. That encouraged the movement underground and set off a vicious cycle. The worse the weather got, the more eagerly the land was dug into and the domes built and the weather got still worse. Now the planet has become a world of almost incessant cloudiness and frequent rains - or snow when it's cold enough. The only thing is that no one can work it out properly. No one has worked out an analysis that can explain why the weather has deteriorated quite as it has or how one can reasonably predict the details of its day-to-day changes."
Dors Venabili mentions one possible explanation for the phenomenon, in chapter 77, "Officers":
"Forty billion people use a great deal of power and every calorie of it eventually degenerates into heat and has to be gotten rid of. It's piped to the poles, particularly to the south pole, which is the more developed of the two, and is discharged into space. It melts most of the ice in the process and I'm sure that accounts for Trantor's clouds and rains, no matter how much the meteorology boggins insist that things are more complicated than that."
The weather wasn't always bad, as we see in the year 12029GE, in "Forward the Foundation" (written in 1992), chapter 6 in part 2, "Cleon 1", when Seldon is walking in the imperial gardens:
"The weather was holding up over the undomed area of the Imperial Palace grounds - warm and sunny.
It didn't often happen."
However, in his first round of writing, Asimov never mentioned anything special about the Trantor climate. In "Foundation", the first collection of stories that Asimov wrote in 1941-42, when Gaal Dornick first arrives in Trantor in the year 12068GE, he asks the room clerk at his hotel about the weather conditions upperside and hears the good news: "Good weather. Come to think of it, I do believe it's the dry season now." So, if the climate was such that it's "almost incessant cloudiness and frequent rains - or snow when it's cold enough", then how can there exist a "dry season"?
My guess is that Asimov became enamoured of the chaos theory that became popular during the 1980's and wanted to mention it in his books. It just didn't occur to him to check for earlier references to the Trantor climate.
The neuronic whip works by causing extreme pain, somewhat like the "tasers" used by security forces on Earth today, (which discharge 50000 volts through the victim), with the difference that the neuronic whip works at a greater distance and its principle of operation isn't described.
The blaster, differently from the neuronic whip, is lethal. The problem is that, each time a blaster is used, we get a different description for the effects. We have three different examples of blaster use in the stories:
1) When Raych Seldon kills Gleb Andorin, in "Forward the Foundation", chapter 25 of part 2 "Cleon 1":
"A blaster, despite its name, does not 'blast' in the proper sense of the term. It vaporizes and blows out an interior and - if anything - it causes an implosion. There's a soft sighing sound, leaving what appears to be a 'blasted' object".
2) When Wienis kills himself in "Foundation", chapter 8 of part 3 "The Mayors":
"And, with a yell of despair, Wienis changed his aim and shot again - and toppled to the floor, his head blown into nothingness".
3) When Golan Trevize kills a dog in Aurora, in "Foundation and Earth", chapter 9, part 3 "Aurora":
"The dog must have felt the initial surge of heat, and made the smallest motion as though it were about to leap. And then it exploded, as a portion of its blood an cellular contents vaporized".
We are first told that the blaster was set at the three-quarter mark, which "should be ample to kill a dog with a loud report". Contrast this with the "soft sighing sound" when Gleb Andorin was killed.
That is, each time a "blaster" is used the effect is different. One could say that "blaster" was a generic name for several different types of guns, after all the time between these three incidents is several hundreds of years. However, people usually give specific names to specific types of guns, distinguishing small details among them. For instance, shotgun, carbine, musket, and rifle are all specific names for different types of guns that are actually very similar: all are fired from the shoulder and use chemical explosives to shoot projectiles made of lead.
In "Foundation and Earth" we are given an explanation on the blaster's principle of operation, as Bander explains in chapter 10, part 4 "Solaria":
"This one seems to be a microwave beamer that produces heat, thus exploding any fluid-containing body".
However this violates one basic mathematical principle of physics, which is unlikely to change in the next millions of years: in order to emit a directional wave beam, the weapon must have a physical size larger than the waves emitted. A hand-sized gun emitting microwaves would spread radiation to all directions, diluting the beam and also hitting its owner with spilled radiation.
All this is very well, but in "Foundation and Earth" Golan Trevize mentions that "Just outside the Galaxy are the Magellanic Clouds, where no human ship has ever penetrated". Also, "In all human history, no other intelligence has impinged on us, to our knowledge". All this was said in the presence of R. Daneel Olivaw, who had mentioned that "With every memory of twenty thousand years perfectly recorded and with a perfect recall mechanism in place, the brain is filled". Souldn't Daneel warn Trevize about the Cepheians? Also, if Empire ships of the 970's could reach the Magellanic clouds, wouldn't the Foundation ships of the 12400's also have that capacity? Why didn't the Foundation explore the Magellanic clouds?
On the other hand, the ship computer that Trevize loves so much, would be hard-pressed to play the simplest computer games from the late 20th century Earth. They get coordinates for 50 stars, translate those stars back 20000 years through their self-motion and fit a sphere to the coordinates, in order to find Earth at the center. Trevize "found himself astonished at how little time it took", it was "a matter of minutes". Hmmpf, so much for the famous "Foundation Technology", my Pentium4 could do the same calculations in a matter of milliseconds...
At that time, the "Manhattan Project" was the most expensive and most secret military project ever implemented. As mentioned by Gordon Thomas and Morgan Witts in "Enola Gay" (1977, Simon and Schuster): "Many thousands of man-hours and dollars had been spent on tapping telephones, collecting details of extramarital affairs, homosexual tendencies, and political affiliations. The dossiers represented the most thorough secret investigation until then carried out in the name of the U.S. government".
Imagine everyone's consternation when a 21-year old chemistry student, born in the Soviet Union, wrote the following words in an escapist story in a cheap magazine ("Foundation", part 2, "The Encyclopedists", chapter 3, Salvor hardin's words):
"It's all very well to drag chancellors into this, but it would be much nicer to drag a few great big siege guns fitted for beautiful atomic bombs into it".
and
"That Anacreon no longer has an atomic-power economy. If they had, our friend would undoubtedly have realized that plutonium, except in ancient tradition, is not used in power plants"
Plutonium, having been discovered by Carl Seaborg in 1940, wasn't a secret, also the huge amount of energy liberated by the fission of uranium and plutonium was openly known, the bomb was a logical inference. However, I suppose any mention of atomic weapons must have touched a raw nerve at the US security agencies at that time.
Curiously, Asimov also predicted the events that would lead to the Chornobyl accident, 44 Earth years later, when Salvor Hardin mentions that:
"In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has blown up because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that atomic technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead, they are to restrict atomic power".
A sad omen for Humanity, when the solution to the problem adopted worldwide on Earth today is exactly the same as chosen by the dying Galactic Empire...
The question is, why were the poles so important? If my quantum physics teachers were telling the truth, a surface at a given temperature will radiate exactly the same heat energy, regardless of where it's pointed at. Of course, the temperature of the radiator is important for the efficiency of the heat cycle, so it's important to keep it protected from the sun. But this can be done with shades, moveable if your technology allows it, or just orient the radiator so the sun will never shine on it. There's no need to have the huge heat pipes needed to carry all the Trantor waste heat to the poles. And there's no need to yield all that political power to the Mayor of Wye.
The simplest way for Trantor to radiate its waste heat would be: cool it with air. Hot air rises and at high altitudes radiates all that heat into the Universe, whose temperature is less than 3 degrees absolute.
Anyhow, why would there be so much waste heat in Trantor? 50% of the energy, we have been told, came from geothermal sources, which do not contribute any net heat to the palnet, since the energy was subtracted from a source that would heat the planet anyway. The same with wind power. Micro fusion reactors would power vehicles and would dissipate their waste heat into the atmosphere. That leaves us with fusion plants and oribtal solar energy collectors, contributing to the net heating of the planet.
We do not have much data regarding Trantor or its sun, but we are repeatedly told in the last two books (last in Galactic time) that all the inhabited planets and their suns more or less resembled Earth. So, let's assume Trantor is Earth-like and its sun resembles our sun. I have done a few calculations and discovered that those forty billion inhabitants of Trantor would have to consume 9600 times as much energy per capita as the USA consumes today to raise the average temperature in Trantor by one degree Celsius.
Where, exactly, did all that energy go? Trantor wasn't an exporter of goods, so it didn't go to the industry. The people in Mycogen lived spartan lives, workers in Dahl didn't have air-conditioning at work... Apart from the Emperor himself, we have no indication anywhere that people in Trantor wasted energy.
The energy and waste heat flow in Trantor is far more misterious than the detailed workings of psychohistory...
