Related papers: Eco - No(?) - Physics - comments and reflexions -
In recent years there has been a closer interrelationship between several scientific areas trying to obtain a more realistic and rich explanation of the natural and social phenomena. Among these it should be emphasized the increasing…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
This text revisits the origins of econophysics through the figure of Beno\^it Mandelbrot, not as the father of fractals, but as the instigator of a distinctive scientific posture. The guiding thread is methodological: accept the stubborn…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between…
Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum…
Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics…
The statistical description and modeling of volatility plays a prominent role in econometrics, risk management and finance. GARCH and stochastic volatility models have been extensively studied and are routinely fitted to market data, albeit…
Physicists have recently begun doing research in finance, and even though this movement is less than five years old, interesting and useful contributions have already emerged. This article reviews these developments in four areas, including…
Energy is no doubt an intuitive concept. Following a previous analysis on the nature of elementary particles and associated elementary quantum fields, the peculiar status and role of energy is scrutinised further at elementary and larger…
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…
This contribution discusses in what respect Econophysics may be able to contribute to the rebuilding of economics theory. It focuses on aggregation, individual vs collective learning and functional wisdom of the crowds.
The role of mathematics in physical sciences is discussed, particularly how higher mathematics found applications in empirical problems. Several examples are given to illustrate this role.
In the absence of empirical confirmation, scientists may judge a theory's chances of being viable based on a wide range of arguments. The paper argues that such arguments can differ substantially with regard to their structural similarly to…
The centuries-long practice of the teaching turned mechanics into an academic construct detached from its underlying science, the physics of macroscopic bodies. In particular, the regularities that delineate the scope of validity of…
During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy…
Dirac sought an interpretation of mathematical formalism in terms of physical entities and Einstein insisted that physics should describe "the real states of the real systems". While Bell inequalities put into question the reality of…
The purpose of the dynamics of moving systems is to search for the mathematical model that describes the link between the resultant applied force, that is the cause, and the speed of system that is the effect. This mathematical link…
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
Physical laws are a set of rules in the relationship between observations made by the experimenter. All these observations are made through a mechanism that links the external world to the experimenter's awareness, a mechanism which is not…