In existographies, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) (IQ:195|#15) (Cattell 1000:233) [RGM:1306|1,500+] (Murray 4000:8|CS / 4|A) (GPE:34) (CR:189) was a French mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, a disciple of Baron d'Holbach (Blumenau, 2014) (Ѻ), notable for having built the first ice calorimeter with Antoine Lavoisier in 1782, with which they made measurements of heat released or absorbed during various chemical reactions and processes, according to which he is one of the founders of thermochemistry. [1]

Social physics
In 1795, Laplace, in his A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Chapter X: Application of the Calculus of Probabilities to the Moral Sciences, famous commented: [3]

“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.”

A follower of Laplace's social science dictum, according to American social science historian Theodore Porter, was Adolphe Quetelet. Quetelet's mécanique sociale, later physique sociale, was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste, and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the presumed method of celestial physics, but even to its concepts and vocabulary. It is too weak to say that Quetelet's goal was the transmission of the achievements of celestial physics into the social sphere. He aspired to nothing less than imitation. [4]

Other
In 1796, Laplace famously published his Exposition of the System of the World, which outlined the mathematical details of what has come to be known as the nebular hypothesis, the theory that the solar system formed billions of years ago from a quickly rotating nebula, or interstellar gas cloud, and that the planets and the sun coalesced from this rotating mass in accordance with the mechanical laws of nature.

Laplace is also eponym of Laplace’s demon (1814), a precursor, so to speak, of Maxwell’s demon (1867).

Laplace’s work on the mathematics of force is said to have been precursor to the later development of the concept of potential.

Quotes | On
The following are quotes on Laplace:

“Laplace is the Newton of France.”
— Simeon Poisson (c.1820), Publication (Ѻ)

“Among the chemical reactions that can develop heat in the living being, the most important, one that predominates all others, is that resulting from the absorption of oxygen from the air and its combination with the elements fuel supplied by food. Breathing, in short, is the main cause, if not unique, the production of vital heat. This was established beyond doubt, first, in the experiments of Lavoisier, Laplace, and then those of Dulong and Regnault, on animals of different species, and then finally my experiments on humans.”
— Gustave Hirn (1868), Philosophical Implications of Thermodynamics [2]

See also
● Napoleon Laplace anecdote

References
1. Partington, J.R. (1957). A Short History of Chemistry. MacMillan and Co.
2. Hirn, Gustave. (1868). Philosophical Implications of Thermodynamics (Métaphysique et conséquences philosophiques de la thermodynamique: l'analyse fondamentale de l'univers) (Metaphysics and Philosophical Implications of Thermodynamics: Basic Analysis of the Universe). Paris: Gauthier-Villars.
3. Laplace, Pierre. (1795). A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Publisher; in: Hawking, Stephen W. (2005). (Ch. X: Application of the Calculus of Probabilities to the Moral Sciences, pgs. 444-). Running Press.
4. Porter, Theodore. (1981). “The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet’s Statistics” (abs), British Journal for the History of Science, 18: 51-69.

External links
● Pierre-Simon Laplace – Wikipedia.
● Pierre Laplace - Eric Weisstein’s World of Scientific Biography.