Candle In A Bottle Conversation Pieces by Carolyn Ives Gilman Book

This series offers a wide variety of texts from short fiction to essays, from speeches and poetry to interviews, correspondence, and group discussions.
The savants of Institut Sorel, the world center of information mechanics, compute the governing algorithms that give all things their shape and structure; the voyants receive and sort enormous amounts of information. And now the savants say that the whole world, on the brink of a phase transition, is about to change, such that the long-term equilibrium that has locked the world into an order crisis will give way to a period of chaos.
Candle in a Bottle first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1996. It was a nominee for the Nebula Award in 1997.