Re: Gregnews: US report proves EP lies

>There is something abusive in words such as   "financial engineering"
>etc, an attempt to borrow the prestige of applied natural science
>into a domain which is does not share the features to which a.n.s.
>owes its prestige, and, from there, to infer that various rules,
>including patent law, should also be transferred from a.n.s. to
>that domain.

There is nothing abusive if you are familiar with modern physics.  If
you read current physics journals, you will see a growing number of
physicists applying the tools of moderm physics (especially statistical
thermodynamics) to analyzing and modeling financial markets and processes.
There is even a word to describe this growing overlap of economics and
physics - econophysics (for example, check out the European Web site for
econophysics - www.unifr.ch/econophysics).

Goods like commodities and currencies are in some ways representations for
energy.  The movement and exchange of such goods is little different than
the movement and exchange of energy in interacting particle systems.  In
both cases, thermodynamics ignores the microscopic interactions and focuses
instead on macroscopic properties.  It is not surprising then that
physicists are successfully able to apply this physics to financial
markets (indeed, Wall Street hires tons of physicists).

So people using phrases like "financial engineering" are not borrowing
prestige - you are - but not them.  These people read the science
papers written by physicists studying financial markets, and take
the scientific techniques in such papers and APPLY THEM to real world
problems.  Since the standard definition of technology is APPLIED
science, it is very legitimate in these circumstances to use the
phrase "financial engineering" (I will agree other uses are marketing
bllsht).

But as I said, you have to know something about modern physics.  There
are many physicsts in Europe who will be glad to explain this to you.

Greg Aharonian