“Statesmen of this and other nations … have embarked upon grandiose undertakings where on physical grounds failure was predictable, and … failure meant that … people perished in vain.”

“In the early phase of their efforts, Professor Stewart and his colleagues in this enterprise confined their efforts to mass human relationships. They treated large aggregates of individuals as though they were composed of social molecules, without attempting to analyze the behavior of each molecule. They then attempted to describe demographic, economic, political, and sociological situations in terms of such physical factors as time, distance, mass, and numbers of people.”

From circa 1945 to 1955, at the Princeton University physics department, Stewart ran a Rockefeller Foundation grant-funded social physics/social mechanics applied research group. [25]

See main: Princeton University Department of Social Physics

“There can be no question of the fact that, in early Princeton, physics cooperated with politics in a sort of analogical double play, Newton to Witherspoon to Madison.”

“Concerning ‘Social Physics’. The quotation marks indicate that it is NOT an accepted science, although it may well become one. Its principal concept: the behavior of people in large numbers may be predicted by mathematical rules. A GIANT observer [see: advanced perspective] who himself was as big as the earth could easily consider a man as being no more than a molecule. From such a vantage point. an observer equipped with appropriate devices for measuring population densities and movements might discover that, like molecules in a gas, groups of men obey certain simple physical laws. The point of view would be favorable for formulating an exact social science (see: exact science) — a ‘social physics’.

Molecules are unable to study themselves with such detachment. Nevertheless, man is strongly tempted to try to find some mathematical order in human relations. More than one investigator has sought to apply the analogies and precision of physics to the study of societies. The term "social physics" is at least as old as the nineteenth century French philosopher Auguste Comte, although he contributed nothing to the subject but its name. Today social physics is still only a science in the making. It still has far to go before it is ready for uncritical acceptance. But already its barrier-breaking results unite demography (the study of populations) with phases of economics, and both of course with physics.

But what has physics to do with people? Men, after all, are more than molecules. Can we advance the study of human relations by forgetting that they are human? Or, to put it another way, can we roughly approximate satisfactory overall solutions of mass sociological problems by an analysis that averages the conflicting desires and the varied characteristics of individuals into a uniform mathematics?

I am confident that we can. People can be counted. They exist in space and time. Their distances apart can be measured. Their activities are subject to mechanical limitations which can be described. True, an individual human being is a complex, often unpredictable organism. But the physics of atoms is subject to similar uncertainties. The famous indeterminacy principle, stalest by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, means that the motions of individual corpuscles cannot be described with indefinitely great precision. The behavior of an individual particle is exceedingly hard to predict. Nonetheless the physicist makes progress because the averaged motions of a group of corpuscles conform to mathematical formulas or ‘laws’. In the same way, human behavior can be averaged.

When the physicist attempts to study people in their societies by comparing them to molecules in fluids, his difficulty is not that there are too many people but too few. If reduced to the size and density of molecules in normal air, the entire world's population would comprise a cube only a thousandth of an inch on a side. To reduce the planet to this size, our physicist must be a coarse-grained giant of astronomical dimensions. Little wonder that professors of history, politics and economics …”

See main: Social gravitation

“With the help of a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, a handful of scholars at Princeton University have been working for some time past in what most people would call a new science: social physics. As the name implies, this science is based on the proposition that physical laws governing the behavior of atoms and planets are applicable as well to social relationships among humans. Distance and time spate one mass of people (a city, say, or a nation) from another and affect interactions accordingly: the number of people and their psychological temper and desire also help to decide what turns are taken in world’s affairs. Stewart, associate professor of astronomical physics at Princeton, equates these half dozen social quantities with six fundamental categories of physical science—distance, time, mass, number of molecules, temperature, and electric charge. And he says that it is most unfortunate that the parallels are ignored by politicians and statesmen, for the laws of science have a way of making themselves felt even when the existence is disputed. “Statesmen of this and other nations … have embarked upon grandiose undertakings where on physical grounds failure was predictable,” Stewart observes, “and … failure meant that … people perished in vain.”

— John Lear (1957), “The Laws of Social Relations” [2]

“The way of progress—in social physics—is obstructed by the opinion, common among authorities on economics, politics, and sociology, that human relationships never will be described in mathematical terms. There may be some truth in this as regards the doings of individual persons, but the time to emphasize individual deviations is after the general averages have been established, not before.”

— John Q. Stewart (1947), “Empirical Mathematical Rules Concerning Distribution and Equilibrium of Population” (pg. 461)

“There is no longer excuse for anyone to ignore the fact that human beings, on average and at least in certain circumstances, obey mathematical rules resembling in a general way some of the primitive ‘laws’ of physics. ‘Social physics’ lies within the grasp of scholarship that is unprejudiced and truly modern. When we have found it, people will wonder at the blind opposition its first proponents encountered.”

— John Q. Stewart (1947), “Empirical Mathematical Rules Concerning Distribution and Equilibrium of Population” (pg. 485)

“One has to find for himself that in the country of the blind—meaning university faculties and their learned societies—the one-eyed man meets with lifted eyebrows.”

— John Q. Stewart (1950) on early 1920s attempts to initiate social physics [6]

“Our immediate quest is for uniformities in social behavior which can be expressed in mathematical forms more or less corresponding to the known patterns of physical science. Social physics so defined analyzes … sociological situations in terms of purely physical factors: time, distance, mass of material, and number of people, which recourse also to social factors which can be shown to operate in a similar way to two other physical agents, namely, temperature and electrical charge. Social physics describes mass human aggregations of individuals as though there were composed of ‘social molecules’ without attempting to analyze the behavior of each molecule.”

— John Q. Stewart. (1952), “A Basis for Social Physics” [8]

“Immaturity, lack of imagination, ‘doctrinaire departmentalism’, and [in particular] overspecialization is choking modern scholarship and limiting man’s communication with his fellows.”

— John Q. Stewart (1955), commentary on efforts to initiate an interdisciplinary social physics department at Princeton [5]

“For thirty years, I have harbored a deep-seated desire to find some order in the social sciences comparable to that in the physical sciences.”

— John Q. Stewart (1955), “Social Physics” [5]

A 1999 listing (Ѻ) of a some Stewart publications, as pertains geostatistical analysis.