Demographic gravitation is a concept of "social physics",[1] introduced by Princeton University astrophysicist John Quincy Stewart[2] in 1947.
[3] It is an attempt to use equations and notions of classical physics, such as gravity, to seek simplified insights and even laws of demographic behaviour for large numbers of human beings.
It has been related[4][5] to W. J. Reilly's law of retail gravitation,[6][7] George Kingsley Zipf's Demographic Energy,[8] and to the theory of trip distribution through gravity models.
Writing in the journal Sociometry, Stewart set out an "agenda for social physics."
Comparing the microscopic versus macroscopic viewpoints in the methodology of formulating physical laws, he made an analogy with the social sciences: Fortunately for physics, the macroscopic approach was the commonsense one, and the early investigators – Boyle, Charles, Gay-Lussac – were able to establish the laws of gases.
If Robert Boyle had taken the attitude of many social scientists, he would not have been willing to measure the pressure and volume of a sample of air until an encyclopedic history of its molecules had been compiled.
Boyle did not even know that air contained argon and helium but he found a very important law.
[3] Stewart proceeded to apply Newtonian formulae of gravitation to that of "the average interrelations of people" on a wide geographic scale, elucidating such notions as "the demographic force of attraction," demographic energy, force, potential and gradient.
For comparison, Reilly's retail gravity equilibrium (or Balance/Break Point) is paraphrased as: (Population 1 divided by (distance to balance, squared) = Population 2 / (distance to balance, squared)) Recently, a stochastic version has been proposed[9] according to which the probability