Auguste Comte(1798-1857)
French sociologist and philosopher
“Now that the human mind has grasped celestial and terrestrial physics, mechanical and chemical, organic physics, both vegetable and animal, there remains one science, to fill up the series of sciences or observation—social physics. This is what men have now most need of; and this it is the principal aim of the present work to establish.”Namely that we need to establish a branch of physics and chemistry that grasps sociological phenomena the same way we have mastered: celestial mechanics, terrestrial physics, analytical mechanics, chemical physics, and organic physics.
James Froude (1818-1894)English clergyman-abnegator turned historian, novelist, biographer, and editor
“What is man the wiser or the happier for knowing how the air-plants feed, or how my centuries the flint-stone was in forming, unless the knowledge of them can be linked on to humanity, and elucidate for us some of our hard moral mysteries?”
a publication, which, ironically—in that two decades later Florence Nightingale would propose to initiate such a chair (see below, 1874)—lost him his fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford, after which he would go in, in 1854, to do the first “anonymous” first English translation (see: translations) of Goethe’s physical chemistry based book Elective Affinities (1809), which would go on in the three centuries to follow to form the basis and any and all type of physicochemical humanities courses.
Florence Nightingale(1820-1910)
Italian-born English social reformer
On the passing of Belgian statistical mathematician and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), author of Essay on Social Physics (1835), her social theory mentor since circa 1859, proposed that a readership or chair in social physics be established at Oxford University and lobbied up until 1891 to get such a chair established, offering to put forward $100,000 USD, in modern terms, of her own money.“The only fitting memorial to Quetelet would be to introduce his science [social physics] in the studies of Oxford, upon which alone social and political philosophy can be founded, which as he said himself ought no means to be limited to the administrative or legislative domain but should be the interpreter of all theodike, all the government and its laws embracing the smallest and the most accidental to the greatest and most universal actions and phenomena of our moral physical life.”See the: Nightingale Chair of Social Physics for elaboration on this project. Section shown above (right) is Canadian social science historian Lynn McDonald’s 2003 chapter section header on Florence Nightingale’s 1874-1891 Oxford social physics chair initiation project. [1]— Florence Nightingale (1874), “In Memoriam”, Feb 21“I think the [following] needs doing: [we need] a scheme from someone of high authority as to what should be the work and subjects in teaching ‘social physics’ and their practical application, in the event of our being able to obtain a statistical professorship or readership at the University of Oxford.”— Florence Nightingale (1891), “Letter to Francis Galton”, Feb 7
Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900)
German philosopher
— Friedrich Nietzsche (1878), Human, All Too Human; first use of ‘sublimation’ in psychology
Henry Adams(1838-1918)
American historian and physico-chemical social dynamics pioneer
“Social chemistry—the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules—is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life.”— Henry Adams (1885), “Letter to Clover Adams”, Apr 12
“I’m looking for a young and innocent physico-chemist [see: Henry Bumstead] who wants to earn a few dollars by teaching an [historian] idiot what is the first element of theory and expression in physics.”— Henry Adams (1908), “Note to John Jameson”, Dec
“My Letter to Teachers was meant simply to ‘teach teachers how to teach’. Schopenhauer prophecied it nearly a hundred years ago. Nothing is to be gained by preaching this lesson as a form of energy. It would act as a dissipator of energy. Therefore I have taught it, or tried teaching it, only to the few men who could profit by it to economise their scholar’s energies,—to save them from wasting it on past processes. Economy is all I can see now, as true scientific object for education to pursue. Certain branches of education may soon be lopped off, to advantage.”— Henry Adams (1910), “Letter to Barrett Wendell”, May 18
Adams, in his most-famous The Education of Henry Adams, summarized how the majority of modern education, such as his own at Harvard, is time wasted, and how the modern mind needs education in “physico-chemical social dynamics”, as he referred to the subject he had in mind.
Maurice Hauriou(1856-1929)
French social-philosopher and law professor
“There is need to establish a new science … one that compares the mechanics of social science and social movement with thermodynamics. In doing so, the human mind obeys the feeling that he has the web link and continuity of natural phenomena. It will be then possible to determine more accurately the specific content of this new science and to classify the essential elements, which will then serve as a touchstone of human theories.”— Maurice Hauriou (1899), Lessons on Social Movement
Edwin Slosson(1865-1929)
American chemist and religion-science reconciler
“Every university should have a Department of Applied Greek and a complementary Department of Humanized Physics, and the benefits of these departments also should be extended as freely as is practicable to those who need them most, that is, to those whose main work is in another field.”— Edwin Slosson (1910), Great American Universities
In his Sermons of a Chemist (1925), he would go on to attempt to integrate atomic theory and relativity with the Bible and ideas on God; comments how his ideas are similar to Albert Mathews; in 1935, American philosopher Oliver Reiser, a correspondent of Slosson, commented in a footnote in his book Philosophy and Concepts of Modern Science, in his discussion section on the social energetics theorists, who brought physical chemistry methods to bear on social problems, such as Wilhelm Ostwald, Henry Adams, and Thomas Carver, that “I shall do my best to carry this view a step forward”; meaning that Reiser's aim was to continue the work on the thermodynamic application to history started by Slosson. This, however, did not seem to actualize into much further.
Werner Stark(1909-1985)
Czechoslovakian-born English sociologist
“Why should no social chemistry ever been developed? Nobody would suggest that the social scientists should imitate meteorology, for this discipline does not appear to have got very far, but what about chemistry? A sociology based on chemistry has in fact been called for, but this call has found no echo. It would have been easy to take up this suggestion and develop it further. An intending social chemist would have found it one whit more difficult to manufacture a sociological parallel to the Boyle-Charles law than Haret did to the Newtonian propositions. But the experiment appears never to have been tried. Why?”— Werner Stark (1962), The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought
Ernest Samuels(1903-1996)
American lawyer and English professor
“Man must jump, as Adams liked to say, if he would save himself; a moral and intellectual elite must be recruited. If nothing else would serve to make moral philosophers out of historians, the fear of imminent annihilation might. University education must be revolutionized by the physicist-historian.”— Ernest Samuels (1989), Henry Adams
Paul Bohannan(1920-2007)
American anthropologist
“Adapting thermodynamic ideas to the study of culture is limited by a very simple fact: nobody has yet figured out what might be the cultural equivalent of heat or energy … nobody has yet found the ‘heat’ or the ‘energy’ in cultural matters … the concepts of ‘cultural temperature’ (see: social temperature) to refine our understanding of ‘cultural heat’ (see: social heat) have not yet appeared. This is one of the most pressing problems for the next generation of anthropologists, and the difficulties are profound.”— Paul Bohannan (1995), How Culture Works
In 1992, Mimkes, as head of physics department of Paderborn University, German, assembled his department together to figure out, from a physics point of view, if anything could be done to remedy, recent student shooting incidents, arising between two cultural groups; thereafter he launched the world's first graduate department of thermodynamics based physical socio-economics; which produced several masters degree students.
Began working, in 2007, with physicist 
