Quetelet e Observáveis Macroscópicos

A. Quetelet Reserches sur le penchant au crime aux différens ages (1832):

"...whatever concerns the human species, considered en masse, belongs to the domain of physical facts; the greater the number of individuals , the more the individual will is submerged beneath the series of general facts which depend on the general causes according to which society exists and is conserved."

A treatise on man and the development of his faculties (1842)

Dividido em:

I. Development of Physical Qualities of Man
II. Development of Statute, Weight, Strength
III. Development of the Moral and Intellectual Qualities of Man
IV. Of The Properties of the Average Man , of The Social System ...

Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Leviathan = לִוְיָתָן (sea-monster)

Na Introdução: Porque pela arte é criado aquele grande Leviatã a que se chama República,
ou Estado, que não é senão o homem artificial, embora de maior estatura e força
do que o homem natural, para cuja proteção e defesa foi projetado.

Sociology versus Social Physics

P. Ball Critical Mass pp.71:



1. A. Comte (1798-1857) Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842) pp.192:

"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 of 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."


2. Quetelet(1796-1874) utilizou o termo "mecánique sociale". Comte introduziu o termo physique sociale, Quetelet publicou seu primeiro artigo explorando a sugestão de Comte. No entanto, sugeria a utilização de Estatística como linguagem. Comte não gostava de Estatística e resolveu introduzir "Sociologia" como novo nome.

Tolstoi e Leis em Historia

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1868) Volume III Parte III apresenta um ensaio sobre leis no processo histórico.

Clausius and Tenure

Rudolf J. E. Clausius (1822-1888) foi da primeira geração de tenured professors no império prussiano.

Em A History of Thermodynamics , Ingo Muller p72.

"Tenure was intended to protect freedom of thought as much as to guarantee financial security. The system worked fairly well for one hundred years before it was undermined by job seekers or frustrated managers , who failed in their industrial career. They are without scientific ability or interest, and spend their time attending committee meetings, reformulating curricula, and tending their gardens. "

Hobbes, Euclides e Galileu

1. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) publicou Leviathan em 1651.
2. Principia Mathematica de Newton é de 1686.
3. Hobbes fugiu para a França em 1642 quando iniciou a guerra civil na Inglaterra. Charles I foi executado por Oliver Cronwell em 30 de Janeiro de 1649. Cronwell morreu em 1658.
4. Hobbes foi secretário de Francis Bacon (1561-1626) quando tinha vinte e poucos anos.
5. P. Ball Critical Mass pp 15 :
"...Hobbes happened to glance at a book which lay open in a library, and was transfixed. The book was Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and Hobbes began to follow one of the Propositions. ' By God, this is impossible!', he exclaimed - but was soon persuaded otherwise. As Hobbes' contemporary, the gossipy biographer John Aubrey, tells it,

'So he reads the Demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a Proposition; which proposition he read: that referred him back to another, which he also read, and so on, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with Geometry.'


6. Viajou a Florença em 1636 e encontrou Galileu (1564-1642). P.Ball p17:

"Hobbes became convinced that this [inertia] must be the axiom he was seeking. Constant motion was the natural state of things - including people, All human sensations and emotions, he concluded, were result of motion. From this basic principle Hobbes would work upwards to a theory of society".

7. Dividido em quatro partes: Do Homem, Da República, Da Republica Cristã e Do Reino das Trevas.

8. Postula um modelo de homem e busca leis universais de interação. Tenta escrever "Os Elementos" da Política.

Maxwell e Herschel

Maxwell teria lido o review de Sir John Herschel no Edinburgh Review de Julho de 1850 sobre “Quetelet on Probabilities”. Ali há a seguinte afirmação (Essays from the Edinburgh and Quaterly Reviews with Addresses and Other Pieces By Sir JohnF.W. Herschel, pp. 398, 1857 ):

1. “Suppose a ball is dropped from a great height given the intention that it should fall on a given mark. Fall as it may, its deviation from the mark is error and the probability of that error is the unknown function of its square i.e. the sum of the deviations in any two rectangular directions. Now, the probability of any deviation depending solely on its magnitude, and not on its direction, it follows that the probability of each of these rectangular deviations must be the same function of its square. And since the observed oblique deviation is equivalent to the two rectangular ones, supposed concurrent, and which are essentially independent of one another, and is, therefore, a compound event of which they are the simple independent constituents, therefore the probability will be the product of their separate probabilities. The form of the unknown function comes to be determined from this condition, viz., that the product of such functions of two independent elements is equal to the same function of their sum. But it is shown in every work of algebra that this property is the peculiar characteristic of, and belongs only to, the exponential function. This, then, is the function of the square of the error, which expresses the probability of committing that error.”

2. (pp.422) "As an instance of this nature, we
shall take a phenomenon which has engaged the attention of all who have written
on probabilities, from Laplace downwards ; one
which has been much insisted on by M. Quetelet,
and on whose acknowleged obscurity his inquiries
have at length thrown a ray of light; viz., the
excess of the number of births of male over that
of female infants. As a matter of observation, the
phenomenon is indisputable ; but it requires the
assemblage of a great number of instances to bring
it out into evidence. In individual experience, or
in the birth registers of a parish or small town, the
tendency to excess on the male side is quite overlaid
and concealed by accidental irregularities. It
is otherwise when those of great cities or whole
nations are consulted. The irregularities then
disappear by mutual destruction, and the result
exhibits the tendency in question in its full promi-
nence."

3. pp 444 "
' An exposition of the political condition belongs essentially to the statistics of a country. We do not, however, know how to express it in figures. The same may be said of information relative to the moral and intellectual condition. The simple recital of what has passed in a locality at a particular time sometimes better teaches the moral condition of a people than all the numerical tables possible.'

4. Statistics, however, deals essentially with num-
bers. It may be difficult, or impossible to express
numerically the degree of political freedom, the
extent to which the institutions of a country fulfil
the ends of their establishment and maintenance,
or the degree in which its fiscal regulations press
upon its inhabitants, yet these are nevertheless
results capable of being estimated, and which it is
of the last importance to estimate ; and the esti-
mation must ultimately rely, to a considerable
extent, on the numerical exhibition of particulars.
Thus, to say nothing of the statistics of elections
in which numbers are easily and precisely attain-
able, or of those of crime, accurate returns may
and ought to be obtained and published of a great
variety of particulars relative to the administration
of justice in our civil courts, by which our judg-
ment as to their well or ill working may be
influenced. As examples, we may specify the
statistics of juries, common and special, those of
legal decisions in civil cases, more especially as
regards the cases of new trials moved for and
obtained, and their grounds ; of decisions ap-
pealed from to higher tribunals, and of the pro-
portion of cases in which such new trials or such
appeals have affirmed or reversed the former de-
cision, points of great interest as concerns the
confidence with which the decision of a civil court
may be relied on by its suitors, but of which, if
any official returns exist in this country, we have
been unable, after some considerable amount of
inquiry, to procure them.

"

Maxwell e Buckle

Lendo P. Ball Critical Mass (pp.80):


1. Kant "Idea of universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view" (1794):

"Individual men , and even whole nations, little think, while they are pursuing their own purposes...that they are advancing unconsciously under the guidance of a purpose of nature which is unknown to them.



2. A mécanique sociale de A. Quetelet foi promovida no Reino Unido por Henry Thomas Buckle
(1821-62):

a. "societies automatically produced order, symetry and law. Lawgivers are nearly always the obstructors of society".

b. "History is science"

c. History of Civilization in England (1857-1861), morreu antes de completar.



3. Maxwell em carta para Lewis Campbell:

"One night I read 160 pages of Buckle's History of Civilization - a bumptious book, strong positivism, emancipation from exploded notions and that style of thing, but a great deal of actually original matter, the result of fertile study and not mere brainspinning"


4. Maxwell em "Molecules"(The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, v2 p.374, v1) sobre
a necessidade de abandonar-se a descrição de detalhes históricos:

"the smallest portion of matter which we can subject to experiment consists of millions of molecules, not one of which ever becomes individually sensible to us. We cannot, therefore, ascertain the actual motions of any one of these molecules; so that we are obliged to abandon the strict historical[Newtonian] method, and adopt the statistical method of dealing with large groups of molecules... In studying the relations between quantities of this kind, we meet with a new kind of regularity of averages, which we can depend upon quite sufficiently for all practical puposes."


5.Em Does the progress of Physical Science tend to give any advan-
tage to the opinion of Necessity (or Determinism) over
that of the Contingency of Events and the Freedom of the
Will? Ensaio publicado em 1873 e presente em The Life of James Clerk Maxwell pp. 438:

"those uniformities which we observe in our experiments with quantities of matter containing millions of millions of molecules are uniformities of the same kind as those explained by Laplace and wondered at by Buckle arising from the slumping together of multitudes of causes each of which is by no means uniform with the others."

6. (P.Ball pp 85) "Maxwell began his work on kinetic theory of gases shortly after reading
Buckle. "