John Herschel, son of Sir William, nephew of Caroline

The kinetic theory of gases actually owes its formulation not to physics but to the social sciences. After the French revolution the great mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was required to adapt his work to serve the revolutionary goals, and to educate the populace through a series of public lectures. To this purpose Laplace adapted his studies of probability theory to demography and actuarial determination.

Laplace's lectures were attended by the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet, who was inspired by them to formulate the study of “Staatswissenschaft,” the forerunner of the modern statistical social sciences. Quetelet's work was heralded as a cure for societal ills, and was championed by the social reformer Florence Nightingale.

This subsequently inspired James Clerk Maxwell, through his reading of an essay on Quetelet's work written by John Herschel , to adopt a strategy using Laplace's probabilistic methods as a basis for his kinetic theory of gases.