“We cannot forget that there are two kinds of behavior with which we are already intimately acquainted: on one hand, the behavior of weights and electric charges and chemical reagents; on the other hand, the behavior of man. These require two distinct vocabularies, and most writers who describe animal behavior have adopted the one or the other. We have ‘nature fakers’, who make animals think and act just like men, and there are the others, who regard the swarming of bees as a sort of chemical reaction. I do not know which of these two extremes to regard as the more futile, for both extrapolations go far beyond what is now justifiable. Yet the attempt to bridge the vast gulf is a legitimate aim of science.”

“Forget the classic image of an atom as a solid ball with a smaller solid ball orbiting around it. Think about the nucleus as a jostling swarm of bees.”

An modified version of American illustrator Linda Hensley’s 2010 illustration of American nuclear physicist Philip Ugorowski’s description of the “nucleus as a jostling swarm of bees, and I happily absorbed his explanation of the orbiting electrons as more bees, or maybe gnats” to illustrate the apparent (or non-apparent) "dead atom" / "living molecule" (bee) divide, dichotomy, or dualism. [7]

“I developed [the bee analogy] after reading The Tao of Physics [1975], which talks about something similar. Basically it's that the standard model of physics describes forces between particles like protons, neutrons and electrons as arising out of the exchange of virtual particles or photons. This exchange makes the particles "aware" of each other, and the exchange is what actually produces the force. For example, two protons, being both negatively charged, will repel, but how? What is the actual mechanism of the 'electric field'? If you think of them as not solid objects like balls but more as swarms of bees, then you can see how, by exchanging bees, the two swarms would be able to tell (by the rate of exchange of bees) how large the other swarm was, and how close. It is in this exchange that the particles "feel" the presence of the other, and are pulled or pushed toward or away from each other. So-called 'solid' objects are actually more process than substance. Even a single proton is considered to be mostly empty space, with 3 quarks flying around in a tightly defined volume of space.”

“While it was long possible and sometimes tempting for physicists to deny the usefulness of the molecular hypothesis, we economists have the good luck of being some of the ‘molecules’ of economic life ourselves, and of having the possibility through human contacts to study the behavior of other ‘molecules’.”

“There is an unbridgeable gap between the ‘behavior’ of [subatomic particles] and those of human beings who constitute the objects of study of social science. Aside from pure physical reflexes, human behavior cannot be understood without the concept of volition—the unbridgeable capacity to change our minds up to the very last minute. By way of contrast, the elements of nature ‘behave’ as they do for reasons of which we know only one thing: the particles of physics do not ‘choose’ to behave as they do.”

“Economics: the study how consumers and producers as economic agents behave, how prices are determined, how the performances of an economy is measured by things like growth, unemployment and inflation, and how government policies may affect the performances of the economy.”