Related papers: Economics: The next physical science?
Economic transformation -- change in what an economy produces -- is foundational to development and rising standards of living. Our understanding of this process has been propelled recently by two branches of work in the field of economic…
The application of principles of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to economic systems is considered in a broad historical perspective, extending from prehistoric times to the present day. The hypothesis of maximum entropy production…
One 'problem' with the 21st century world, particularly the economic and business worlds, is the phenomenal and increasing number of interconnections between economic agents (consumers, firms, banks, markets, national economies). This…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…
We consider the thermodynamic approach to the description of economic systems and processes. The first and second laws of thermodynamics as applied to economic systems are derived and analyzed. It is shown that there is a deep analogy…
The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…
Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional…
The institution of money can be seen as a foundational social mechanism, enabling communities to quantify collectively regulate economic processes. Money can be said, indeed, to constitute the micro-macro link in economics. This paper…
Starting from the guiding principles of spacetime locality and operationalism, a general framework for a probabilistic description of nature is proposed. Crucially, no notion of time or metric is assumed, neither any specific physical…
Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…
This paper is concerned with complex macroscopic behaviour arising in many-body systems through the combinations of competitive interactions and disorder, even with simple ingredients at the microscopic level. It attempts to indicate and…
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…
It has been shown that the long term evolution of the Gross Product of the World after World War II can be well portrayed by the exponential function with the crossover at the year 1973, cinsiding with the Oil Crisis onset. For the the…
As David Berlinski writes (1997), the existence and nature of mathematics is a more compelling and far deeper problem than any of the problems raised by mathematics itself. Here we analyze the essence of mathematics making the main emphasis…
Both self-organization and organization are important for the further development of the sciences: the two dynamics condition and enable each other. Commercial and public considerations can interact and "interpenetrate" in historical…
We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…
Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…
A description of physical reality in which wholeness is the foundation is discussed along with the motivation for such an attempt. As a possible mathematical framework within which a physical theory based on wholeness may be expressed,…
A financial market is a system resulting from the complex interaction between participants in a closed economy. We propose a minimal microscopic model of the financial market economy based on the real economy's symmetry constraint and…