…so said Pink Floyd in Dark Side of the Moon. And how right they turned out to be.

The statistical rules governing the distribution of money and wealth bear more than a passing resemblance to the ideal gas laws. In fact, the statistical mechanics of money and wealth distribution have their own sub-headings in the Econophysics chapter of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science. There can be no greater accolade for an incipient field of endeavor than that.

The chapter is an excellent introduction to the physics of money, a new science that I know will be close to yer heart. It gives the history of the topic as well as the current state of the field. Believe me, this is gonna be a growth area, particularly when somebody starts mapping the way money flows through the economy onto the social structures and webs that exist within society. It’s gonna be dynamite.

Now I know what ya’ll thinkin. There ought to be some kinda secret knowledge known only to physicists that allows them to horde more than their fair share of this stuff. After all, Pink Floyd managed it.

If there is, nobody told Victor “Yak” Yakovenko, the author. Judging by Yak Yak’s dress sense, econophysics still don’t pay.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0709.3662: Statistical Mechanics Approach to Econophysics

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 12:02 am and is filed under Nets 'n' webs, Pennies and cents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.