More Heat Than Light is a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and also how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. It traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect upon the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics. Any discussion of the standing of economics as a science must include the historical symbiosis between the two disciplines. Starting with the philosopher Emile Meyerson's (...) discussion of the relationship between notions of invariance and causality in the history of science, the book surveys the history of conservation principles in the Western discussion of motion. Recourse to the metaphors of the economy are frequent in physics, and the concepts of value, motion, and body reinforced each other throughout the development of both disciplines, especially with regard to practices of mathematical formalisation. However, in economics subsequent misuse of conservation principles led to serious blunders in the mathematical formalisation of economic theory. The book attempts to provide the reader with sufficient background in the history of physics in order to appreciate its theses. The discussion is technically detailed and complex, and familiarity with calculus is required. (shrink)

Engages with the impact of modern technology on experimental physicists. This study reveals how the increasing scale and complexity of apparatus has distanced physicists from the very science which drew them into experimenting, and has fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions.

Acknowledgments THROUGHOUT this book I cite the many people who have provided information on individual programs and activities. ...

In discussing the nature of econophysics, a primary issue must be to understand what it is. This is a rather complicated matter, but attempts at definition have been made. As the neologizers of the term,[1] Rosario Mantegna and H. Eugene Stanley have a distinct authority in this matter. They have proposed the following to define “the multidisciplinary field of econophysics …[as] a neologism that denotes the activities of physicists who are working on economics problems to test a variety of new (...) conceptual approaches deriving from the physical sciences” [2, pp. viii-ix]. (shrink)

“When demand and supply are in stable equilibrium, if any accident should move the scale of production from its equilibrium position, there will be instantly brought into play forces tending to push it back to that position; just as if a stone hanging by a string is displaced from its equilibrium position… But in real life such oscillations are seldom as rhythmical as those of a stone hanging freely from a string; the comparison would be more exact if the string (...) were supposed to hang in the troubled waters of a mill-race, whose stream was at one time allowed to flow freely and at another partially cut off. Nor are these complexities sufficient to illustrate all the disturbances with which the economist and the merchant alike are forced to concern themselves. (shrink)

considerable publicity in some of the leading general science journals such as Science and Nature. While most of this research has appeared in physics journals, some has appeared in economics journals as well, more often when at least one author is an economist. Strong claims have been made by some advocates regarding its reputed superiority to economics (McCauley, 2004), with arguments that in fact the teaching of microeconomics and macroeconomics as they are currently constituted should cease and be replaced by (...) appropriate courses in mathematics, physics, and some other harder sciences. The lack of invariance principles in economics and the failure of economists to deal properly with certain empirical regularities are held against it in this line of argument, although most econophysicists do not go as far as McCauley in proposing the complete replacement of economics as such by econophysics. (shrink)

For several decades now a set of researches from a wide range of different sectors has been developed which goes by the name of “science of complexity” and is opposed point by point to the paradigm of classical science. It challenges the idea that world is “simple.” To the reductionist idea that each process is the sum of the actions of its components it opposes a holistic view. The aim of the present article is to analyze the epistemological status attributed (...) in the science of complexity to several fundamental ideas, such as those of scientific law, objectivity, and prediction. The aim is to show that the hope of superseding reductionism by means of concepts such as that of “emergence” is fallacious and that the science of complexity proposes forms of reductionism that are even more restrictive than the classical ones, particularly when it claims to unify in a single treatment problems that vary widely in nature such as physical, biological, and social problems. (shrink)

Whereas computer simulations involve no direct physical interaction between the machine they are run on and the physical systems they are used to investigate, they are often used as experiments and yield data about these systems. It is commonly argued that they do so because they are implemented on physical machines. We claim that physicality is not necessary for their representational and predictive capacities and that the explanation of why computer simulations generate desired information about their target system is only (...) to be found in the detailed analysis of their semantic levels. We provide such an analysis and we determine the actual consequences of physical implementation for simulations. (shrink)