“The concept of entropy has, until recently, been used primarily in the nonsocial sciences. This book is an attempt to show that it has a useful and valuable role in one branch of the social sciences—the study of urban and regional systems. It is hoped that ‘entropy’ enables the social scientist to tackle some basic problems in a fruitful way, and thus to make progress which might not be possible so easily with more orthodox tools.”

“[My theory] has its origins in some work I was doing in 1966 when I realized that the well-known gravity model could be derived on the basis of an analogy with statistical mechanics rather than Newtonian mechanics.”

“When concepts are transferred from physics to social sciences, the underlying analogy is often unsound, but by systematic analysis, the analogy can be made sound, and the increased understanding thus achieved can create powerful tools (see: toolism) and concepts which are adequate for their new employment. Though part of the study may proceed through analogy, in the end the analogy must be thrown away.”

“Mathematical models have long been used by geographers and regional scientists to explore the working of urban and regional systems, via a system where the equilibrium point changes slowly and smoothly as the parameters change slowly and smoothly. However, this all changed with the advent of catastrophe theory and bifurcation, which enabled the development of models where a quite sudden change in the position of the equilibrium point results from a slow, small, smooth change in one or more parameters.”

“Alan Wilson has written extensively on the use of entropy in social modeling. The specific case which he has emphasized is that of trip frequencies in travel between various points. His general philosophy relies heavily on Jaynes.”

— Elliott Montroll (1974), Quantitative Aspects of Social Phenomena (pg. 160)