Morris Zucker (1945) points out that just as the chemist or engineer doesn't need to know the so-called love life or wills of every single proton (+) or happy particle, above, or electron (-) or sad or angry particle above, in order to make successful predictions so to does the historian not need to know the love life or wills of every single person in history to make predictions. [1]

“Leaving aside the problem of causality or indeterminacy, the theory and practice of science has been that if given an initial state with whose properties we are familiar, and if we know the laws of nature applicable to it, we can predict its future state by virtue of the operation of these laws. The diversity of historical phenomena [and] its apparently lawless and contradictory mode of manifestation, the bewildering reactions of countless human wills in different circumstances and different lands, that gives color to the theory that a science of history is impossible. ‘The historian’, writes Weisengruen ironically, ‘must know all the persons of the period he describes, their family relations, their actual course of action, as well as the opinions they held of each other … All to the smallest detail.’ [1] The chemist and the engineer arrive at quite exact results in their operations and their predictions without knowing the love-life of every single electron and proton of the materials with which they work.”

“Given the ‘lag’ between the source of such metaphors in physics and their use in sociology, we await the discovery soon of social protons, neutrons, and neutrinos.”