Comment la statistique est-elle entrée en physique ?

International audience ; Now that statistics is a branch of mathematics, it is easy to imagine that its use in the field ofhuman affairs is a by-product of modern science’s way of looking at the world. Historical studycontradicts such an idea: it is in the field of human affairs that quantitative statistics have developed,and it is only afterwards that it became a method for the natural sciences. Most physicists in thenineteenth century considered statistics all too human to have a place in the scientific study ofnature. It took all Maxwell’s authority and persuasion to make statistical analysis a new style ofscientific thought in physics.