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Social Physics
Page 42
The imagery of Germanic geometry is that of eighteenth-century mechanics: the problem of location
was represented directly, as a matter of balancing several discrete forces of attraction. Weber's location
problem can actually be solved by building a system of weights and pulleys. In the nineteenth century,
however, it became increasingly common for physicists to represent their problems not directly, as the
interacting influence of several different mechanical elements on each other, but indirectly, as the
solution to some maximum or minimum problem. It turned out that many physical systems could be
thought of as minimizing a quantity called "action," a formulation that greatly simplified analysis. It
also turned out that dynamics could often be usefully represented as a movement of a point representing
the system to locations of minimum potential on an imaginary surface. It was inevitable that the
imagery of these physical concepts would eventually be reflected in thinking about economic
geography. As it turned out, the school that developed along these lines emerged in the United States
after World War II.
The idea of doing geography by analogy with physics was not a foolish one. Those of us who are
deeply indoctrinated in the tradition of neoclassical economic analysis may be tempted to scoff why not
try to build up the story from economic foundations? But neoclassical theory was, as we've already
seen, conspicuously unhelpful at this point in the development of spatial analysis, so one could hardly
be blamed for trying something different.
Also, American geographers who began to look at the data on cities quickly noticed that there were
striking empirical regularities in that data, of the kind that physical scientists are accustomed to seeing
but that are rarely seen
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