
An 1877 depiction (Ѻ) of Zazel, aka the “human cannonball” (Ѻ), being launched from a cannon as a human projectile, re-labeled according to Balfour Stewart’s 1868 conceptualization of a person fired off into society, following raising, as a “social cannon ball”, according to which his or her energy of character and personal energies act as the explosive or potential energy, which gets transformed into the kinetic energy of occupation; shown at top right is a human free energy of formation diagram. [1]

An 1877 depiction (Ѻ) of Zazel, aka the “human cannonball” (Ѻ), being launched from a cannon as a human projectile, re-labeled according to Balfour Stewart’s 1868 conceptualization of a person fired off into society, following raising, as a “social cannon ball”, according to which his or her energy of character and personal energies act as the explosive or potential energy, which gets transformed into the kinetic energy of occupation; shown at top right is a human free energy of formation diagram. [1]

In social models, social cannon ball model, as compared to the billiard ball model or chemistry set model, refers conceptualization of a person "fired" off into society as the "ball" of cannon, according to which their energy of character (character energy) and personal energies act, amid or following their time of raising, as potential energy, which get transformed into the kinetic energy of occupation, which will have varying levels of success, in respect to obtainment of goals, owing to cultural and social resistance, some of which being energy of position, i.e. social position, which is akin to gravitational potential.

Stewart
In 1868, Scottish physicist Balfour Stewart, “The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy”, co-authored with Norman Lockyer, argued that the nature and composition of one's personal energies, e.g. "character energy", "personal energy", etc., are equivalent to the stored "potential energy" of the chemical bond energy (bond energy) of say an explosive like dynamite or gunpowder, itself related to the nature of the power associated with nitrogen, when a cannon ball is fired and the potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy of projectile motion; the gist of his argument is as follows: [1]

“When a man pursues his course undaunted by opposition, unappalled by obstacles, he is said to be a very energetic man. By his energy, we mean the power which he possesses of overcoming obstacles; and the amount of his energy is measured by the amount of obstacles which he can overcome, by the amount of work which he can do. Such a man may in truth be regarded as a social cannon-ball. By means of his energy of character he will scatter the ranks of his opponents and demolish their ramparts.

Nevertheless such a man will sometimes be defeated by an opponent who does not possess a tithe of his personal energy. Now, why is this? The reason is that, although his opponent may be deficient in personal energy, yet he may possess more than an equivalent in the high position which he occupies, and it is simply this position that enables him to combat successfully with a man of much greater personal energy than himself. If two men throw stones at one another, one of whom stands on the top of a house and the other at the bottom, the man at the top of the house has evidently the advantage.

So in like manner, if two men of equal personal energy contend together, the one who has the highest social position has the best chance of succeeding. But this high position means energy under another form. It means that at some remote period a vast amount of personal energy was expended in raising the family into this high position. The founder of the family had doubtless greater energy than his fellow-men, and spent it in raising himself and his family into a position of advantage. The personal element may have long since vanished from the family, but it has been transmuted into something else, and it enables the present representative to accomplish a great deal, owing solely to the high position which he has acquired through the efforts of another. We thus see that in the social world we have what may be justly called two kinds of energy, namely:

1. Actual or personal energy
2. Energy derived from position

Let us now turn to the physical world. In this as in the social world, it is difficult to ascend. The force of gravity may be compared to the force which keeps a man down in the world.”

The "it has been transmuted into something else", certainly, is something in great need of clarification in the modern human chemical thermodynamic sense of the matter; as touched on by Arnopoulos (1993) and Thims (2007), below.


Serbian-born American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla's 1900 human energy diagram, wherein he sort of depicts a man as a cannon-ball, similar, in some respects, to the Stewart-Lockyer social cannon-ball model. [2]

Serbian-born American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla's 1900 human energy diagram, wherein he sort of depicts a man as a cannon-ball, similar, in some respects, to the Stewart-Lockyer social cannon-ball model. [2]

Tesla
In 1900, Serbian-born American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, in his article “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, gives the adjacent crude diagrammatic model of “human energy”, discussing rather cogently the impelling and retarding forces to human movement. [2]

(add discussion)

Arnopoulos
In 1993, French sociophysicist Paris Arnopoulos outlined the gist of the transition from the billiard ball model, which a step below the "cannon ball model", to the "chemistry set model", as he calls it, wherein chemical thermodynamics come into play: [3]

“When we move from the [socio-] mechanical to the [socio-] thermal phenomena of energy, we rise from the atomic ‘billiard ball’ interaction to the molecular ‘chemistry set’ reactions. Unlike the former, the latter do not consider relations simply on the basis of mass, distance, and velocity, but rather temperature, pressure, and volume. The importance of a particular position is therefore, replaced by that of a substantive composition. The physical motion of bodies is replaced by the chemical reactions of compounds [sociomasses].”

(add discussion)

Thims
In 2007, American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims, gave a more-modern rendition of Stewart's “energy of character”, as contrasted with energy of “high social position”, in terms of free energy of formation of “entropy of character” and “entropy of status”. [4] The difference between the two points of view, Stewart-Lockyer (1868) vs. Thims (2007), is that through the works of Rudolf Clausius (1850-1875), the kinetic energy and potential energy model of Stewart and Lockyer were subsumed into Clausius' formulation of internal energy and hence later, through the works of Willard Gibbs (1876), Hermann Helmholtz (1882), and Gilbert Lewis (1923), internal energy was subsumed into the Gibbs free energy function:

$G = U + PV - TS \,$

Hence, the simple two-part energy of "social position" and energy "social character" model of Stewart and Lockyer is no longer a straight and simple translation when attempting modern chemical thermodynamics formulation and discussion of the same social phenomenon.

See also
● Billiard ball model

References
1. Lockyer, Norman and Stewart, Balfour. (1868). “The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy”, MacMillan’s Magazine, 18: 319-; in: Contributions to Solar Physics (pgs. 85-103).
2. (a) Tesla, Nikola. (1900). “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy: with Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy” (Ѻ), The Century, 60: 175-211.
(b) Tesla, Nikola. (1900). The Problem of Increasing Human Energy: with Special Reference to the Harnessing of the Sun’s Energy. Wilder Publications.
3. Arnopoulos, Paris. (1993). Sociophysics: Cosmos and Chaos in Nature and Culture (pg. 26). Nova Publishers, 2005.
4. Thims, Libb. (2007). Human Chemistry (Volume One) (pg. 270). Morrisville, NC: LuLu.