.... the dimensions of society are analogous to the physical dimensions and include numbers of people, distance and time. Social physics deals with observations, processes and relations in these terms. The distinction between it and mathematical statistics is no more difficult to draw than for certain other phases of physics. The distinction between social physics and sociology is the avoidance of subjective descriptions in the former.
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.... emphasis is upon population potentials, product supply potentials, demographic energy, time accessibility and the like. In many cases all that has been necessary is to substitute such quantities as ‘number of people’, ‘size of income’, or ‘quantity produced’ for the mass in the equations of mechanics with time and distance retained as ‘social dimensions’ in the explanation of various regularities amongst social and economic phenomena.
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.... a focus is on the interdependencies of the self-organization of a central place system. The evolution of the system is deterministically modeled, but caters for the indeterminacy of instability when structural changes occur. “These considerations … introduce the concepts of ‘memory’ or ‘history’ into the ‘explanation’ of the state of a system, as well as an ‘uncertainty’ or ‘choice’ as to its future evolution”.
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Phenomenology, Science and geography
Spatiality and the human sciences
John Pickles
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