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Quetelet was among the first to apply statistics to social science, planning what he called "social physics". He was keenly aware of the overwhelming complexity of social phenomena, and the many variables that needed measurement. His goal was to understand the statistical laws underlying such phenomena as crime rates, marriage rates or suicide ...
Social physics or sociophysics is a field of science which uses mathematical tools inspired by physics to understand the behavior of human crowds. In a modern commercial use, it can also refer to the analysis of social phenomena with big data. Social physics is closely related to econophysics, which uses physics methods to describe economics. [1]
The following is a list of people who are considered a "father" or "mother" (or "founding father" or "founding mother") of a scientific field.Such people are generally regarded to have made the first significant contributions to and/or delineation of that field; they may also be seen as "a" rather than "the" father or mother of the field.
Independently from Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès's introduction of the term in 1780, Comte re-invented "sociologie", and introduced the term as a neologism, in 1838. Comte had earlier used the term "social physics", but that term had been appropriated by others, notably by Adolphe Quetelet.
Social science was influenced by positivism, [6] focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative; metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term science sociale to describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier; Comte also referred to the field as social physics. [6] [10]
The development of social science subfields became very quantitative in methodology. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it made many of the natural sciences interested in some aspects of social science methodology. [2]
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei (/ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ oʊ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ /, US also / ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l iː oʊ-/; Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛːi]) or mononymously as Galileo, was a Florentine astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath.
Based on Aristotelian physics, Scholastic physics described things as moving according to their essential nature. Celestial objects were described as moving in circles, because perfect circular motion was considered an innate property of objects that existed in the uncorrupted realm of the celestial spheres .