"God had been forcefully excluded from astronomy during the French Revolution, when Pierre-Simon Laplace rewrote Newton's ideas to create his [Laplace's] deterministic cosmos, in which scientific laws govern every movement of every planet with no need for divine intervention. Inspired by his success, a Belgian astronomer called Alphonse Quetelet decided that human societies are also controlled by laws. ...and so Quetelet suggested that an 'average man' can consistently encapsulate a nation's characteristics. ...Quetelet's successors took his ideas in many different directions. ...Data collection projects proliferated, and statisticians searched for laws governing every aspect of life. ...In physics, the most important application of statistics was to gases."