Daily Inspiration Quote by Simon Newcomb

A mathematician calling economics and psychology his first "scientific experiment" is a polite provocation. Simon Newcomb is positioning these messy, human-driven domains as laboratories - not because they behave like celestial mechanics, but because he wants to see whether they can. The phrasing carries a quiet confidence: if you can quantify uncertainty in the motions of planets, why not in the motions of crowds?

Newcomb was writing from a late-19th-century moment when "science" was expanding its jurisdiction. Economics was trying to professionalize beyond moral philosophy; psychology was attempting to graduate from introspection into measurement. In that context, "undertaking" reads like a declaration of method: not armchair theorizing, but testable claims, data, and a willingness to be wrong. It also signals ambition. He isn't dabbling; he's applying the era's highest-status intellectual toolkit to fields still negotiating legitimacy.

The subtext is a subtle critique of those disciplines as they existed: if economics and psychology need a "scientific experiment", perhaps they haven't been scientific enough. Newcomb's background matters here. Mathematicians often arrive as reformers, importing rigor - and sometimes overestimating what rigor can buy when variables are people, incentives, and self-deception. The sentence holds that tension without admitting it: optimism about measurement, paired with an unspoken admission that the experiment might fail. That makes it feel modern. It's the oldest version of a contemporary impulse: treat society like a system, then discover the system talks back.