History
The concept of critical mass was originally created by game theorist Thomas Schelling and sociologist Mark Granovetter to explain the actions and behaviors of a wide range of people and phenomenon. It was first established and named in Schelling's essay about racial segregation in neighborhoods, published in 1971 in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology, and later in his book, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, published in 1978. The work of Mark Granovetter and his essay, “Threshold models of collective behavior", published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1978 worked to solidify the theory. Everett Rogers later cites them both in his important work, Diffusion of Innovations, in which critical mass plays an important role.
Read more about this topic: Critical Mass (sociodynamics)
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“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)