Lonely baby

Recent discovery of a lonely planet without a star, a mere 80 light years away from the Earth is interesting from many angles. The newborn, just 12 million years old, may indicate a failed star at six times the size of Jupiter. Although ejection theories are abound, this could be a case of star formation in zones not considered active. With this unexpected finding, the frenzy of extra solar planet discovery continues to increase.

However, we now know that planets are out there in large quantities and in every size, age and composition. One has to wonder if further exploration of these somewhat uninteresting objects is a good use of limited resources. It is unclear why so much passion exists in the identification and cataloging of planets. Is it the need to verify the already known structure of the universe or perhaps a desire to find life elsewhere. If it is the former, there is enough data to confirm that planetary systems are replicated across the universe. But if it is the later, then, it is advisable to look closer.

With limited understanding of all the life on planet Earth and possible life in close proximity in the solar system, it does not make sense to seek it elsewhere. If this is driving a good part of the thought processes of budding knowledge seekers, this has the potential for destroying further advances.

Efficient Chicago

The idea was simple but the implications are huge. It is clear to those who understand frameworks but less so to others. The notion that information is quickly reflected in the prices of traded assets, standardized and liquid, in markets that implement clear rules of engagement and property rights, is elegantly obvious. It is, however, singularly confusing to active investors, individuals and institutions, a sizable chunk of the US economy.

The dominance of the Chicago school in shaping economic thinking continues. Recently minted Nobel Laureates – Fama and Hansen, seem to complement wonderfully in the grand tradition of theorization and empirical support. Their work has direct practical consequences for investment decisions and asset pricing models. More importantly, they also provide guidance on resource allocation across the economy.

For example, efficient markets mean passive investing dominates, a conclusion that is robustly supported by empirical observations. Even though risk adjusted excess returns (alpha) is shown to be zero (after management and transaction costs) across investment managers (a direct conclusion of Fama’s Efficient Market Hypothesis), significant resources – money, people and time – are wasted across the world by actively managing liquid investments. One has to wonder why the venerable investment banks and financial institutions, filled to the brim with the brightest, engage in activities that add no value either to themselves or to the economy. To make matters worse, there are over eight million active traders in the US alone, ably assisted by the brokerage houses, pushing buttons and pulling levers arranged on multiple screens in such complexity that they rival the cockpit of the space shuttle. As the markets close every day, some rise like vampires – mad, fast and crazy - aiding and abetting the following day’s trades and newly emerging traders. This is a massive misallocation of capital across the entire economy. This is indeed a systemic issue for the economy where agents are engaged in value destroying activities for a large cohort of the economy, presumably because of monopoly rent and hidden options yielded from asymmetric information between the adviser and the client. Such a market failure, if corrected by appropriate policy actions, could significantly improve global productivity.

Hansen’s method of moments help mere mortals make reasonable models for complex macro phenomena. His focus on incorporating the agent’s thoughts, beliefs, doubts and learnings into modeling her actions and the systematic consideration of uncertainty that is evolving stochastically, is refreshing. Determinism has been the bane of theoretical finance for long and the incorporation of uncertainty in accepted models may help measure risk better – both locally and globally. Policy makers will benefit if they understand that flexibility embedded in policy decisions are valuable in the presence of uncertainty.

Chicago has had an unbelievable run – primarily because of its commitment to embracing unconventional ideas early and nourishing them over long periods of time. However, there are indications that the school is becoming more conventional and it is less inclined to accept emerging ideas. If it deviates from a formula that has been successful for nearly a century, it can quickly mean revert to mediocrity, ably demonstrated by its peers today.

Fusion, fusion everywhere but not here

Recent news that NASA may be making progress toward fusion rockets for inter-planetary travel is encouraging. Given the level of knowledge humans appear to posses, it is embarrassing to be in a situation that limits available energy. Everywhere we look, energy is free and it comes from fusion. The inability of humans to master this universal trick is puzzling, especially because zero cost energy would have set them free – with unlimited food, water and automatically cleaned and stabilized environment for ever.

Digging toxic materials out of the ground and burning them in their unstable green house for energy seem to reveal a level of societal stupidity that is incomprehensible. The tree huggers and hipsters, perhaps with better intentions but with equally stupid notions of energy creation have been clamoring for wind, photovoltaic cells and nuclear fission. Is this because of lack of understanding or is it driven by localized incentives that simply will not allow societally optimal solutions?

Energy creation has to stick to a few simple constraints. The process cannot create waste that needs to use energy and time to process, it cannot affect habitats and the environment and more importantly, it cannot consume more than it produces. What is left?

Connected brilliance

A recent article in the journal of Brain hypothesizes that the unusual level of high connectivity between the left and right hemispheres of Einstein's brain may have contributed to his brilliance. If true, this has implications for many areas including childhood brain exercising and education in general.

Typical designs of the human brain seem to promote hemispherical specialization. This may be an unintentional effect of evolution that may have afforded an advantage to being good in one activity or another. If the objective functions of the individual and society are relatively simple, optimal brain design may be dominated by specialization. After all, it is possible to create an efficient hunting group by assembling spotting, throwing and carrying skills in separate individuals. This seem to have continued in the modern world even in the presence of somewhat more complicated needs.

Education systems that stress focus may create highly specialized individuals, akin to robots that possess a limited, albeit being efficient, skill set. As the information and knowledge needs of society increase, there is a natural push toward specialization. However, education systems that cater to this trend are trading off creating individuals with the ability to transform the world to those who can efficiently work in it.

Education systems providing whole brain content may be able to provide a desirable software connectivity overlay to ordinary brains. It is not realistic to expect another Einstein but perhaps universities can devise ways to incrementally improve what they are provided with.

Simulated colonies

A recent article in the Journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that a simple mathematical simulation explains the formation and progression of human populations between 1500 BCE and 1500 CE. The authors appear proud that their models explain reasonably well how large scale societies formed. However, it also indicates that “intelligently designed” humans resemble ants and bees than something more substantial.

For most of the history of humans – a few parameters that describe the interactions of ecology and geography were enough to explain and forecast their behavior. Sporting fairly simple objective functions that include food, sex and power, human societies flourished with less flexibility and depth shown by ants and bees. They have been understandably proud of the accomplishments of the last few centuries in which they devised faster and more destructive ways to perpetuate the same goals.  Now, simple mathematics prove societal behavior can be easily modeled.

As they dream of perpetuating their genes across the solar system and beyond, humans may benefit from some introspection – what they have done thus far and why they may not do anything different in the future.

Downward mobility

A recent article in Sociology Mind, demonstrating that check cashing outlets strategically target high crime neighborhoods, is an indication that analytics and targeted marketing are kicking into top-gear. Demand for goods and services will be met with supply at prices that will clear the market. The providers of services will maximize profits by selecting the most desirable locations, consumers, products and prices. This is true for crime, guns, prostitution, check-cashing and other such entities. From a policy perspective, however, this has societal implications.

If the reduction of crime has a net economic value to society, then regulating agents that aid crime may be optimal. However, this is an analytical (and empirical) question as regulation adds costs to society by introducing artificial constraints to market clearing mechanisms, resulting in dead-weight losses. The positive spill-over and long-term beneficial effects of crime reduction has to be evaluated against the likely cost of regulations. Both the benefits and costs are uncertain and thus, policies that are staged, introducing flexibility to future course corrections are optimal. Since crime almost always has a perpetrator and a victim, the question is how to shut down access to resources for those who commit the crimes. This is not unlike cutting the blood supply to certain types of cancers. This is, however, a complicated problem as the victims rely on the same mechanisms to live.

Policies have to have a temporal dimension – possibly starting with a severe action (such as government controlled access) with a well laid out plan to move toward a full market based mechanism. The most beneficial policy is not a stagnant one but rather a system with clear and well-articulated transition from necessary regulation to solve the issue at hand to market based mechanisms.

Uncertain governance

As the politicians in Washington battle for their beliefs and brownie points, the coming generation has to seriously consider effecting a transformation in the current governance system. The two-party dysfunction has reached its peak and the halls of the capital are now filled with ignorance and incompetence. The “representatives” simply do not represent the knowledge and capabilities of the population, as over half of them never cared to even vote in recent elections. It is time to move to the future. It is time to break the shackles of irrelevant rules and regulations and equally antiquated law making procedures.

The representative form of democracy is already obsolete in the presence of contemporary and emerging technologies. The elections, controlled by a minority, almost always result in a choice that could be marginally better than the alternative presented, but never the best. Unless the participation in the electoral process can be substantially increased, it will remain to be a sham – an inefficient process to control the damage. The current process elects a handful of people, completely disconnected from the present and with obscene incentives to perpetuate the past. They are ill-equipped to understand the choices in front of them, let alone select the best alternative. Most likely still have fax machines in their offices even though they may not know how to use them. To expect them to effect the best policies for the country is irrational.

The best way to get out of this nightmare is to move to a form of direct democracy – using technology. There is no need to create an inefficient layer between the people and the policies. Alternatives can be easily presented to the people and voted on by the entire country. Perhaps then, the “representatives” can return to their homes and towns and start collecting social security, if it is still available.

Failure

The failure of science to propel thoughts and the failure of religion to lift humanity have left most in the dust – some yearning for meaning and others for food, to sustain themselves. Humans have demonstrated irrationality by living while some attempt to concoct grand theories to explain the inexplicable. In the noise of segmentation – countries, colors and beliefs – homo-sapiens shall sub-optimize and possibly destroy a fantastic quirk in space-time, that is habitable.

They had done it before, erasing sophisticated Neanderthals and running over their cousins across the continents to the South.They had done it before, by pretending superiority and waging wars to prop up their own egos. They had done it before, by travelling far and wide, by injecting diseases and false hopes to the indigenous. They had done it before, by raping and pillaging what is not theirs and then asserting meaningless theories to justify their actions. They had done it before,  by allowing the stupid to rule them and then becoming submissive in their own homes and valleys. They had done it before, by asserting privilege to be talent and initial conditions to be inevitable. They had done it before, by beauty, strength and ignorance.

The failure is irreversible in the presence of societal inflexibility.

Regulatory obsolescence

A recent article in Anesthesia & Analgesia points out that iPhones can already be equipped with Pulse Oximetry – currently only available through expensive and rather bulky equipment in the OR and preparation rooms. However, these devices on smart phones are not yet approved for use. This regulatory overhang is holding back the application of cutting edge technologies in medicine and other areas.

Regulatory agencies with rigid and prescriptive rules are ill-equipped to move at the speed of technology. In such a regime, regulations are likely to constrain the population to antiquated, costly and more risky methods than what may be afforded by contemporary technologies that are more effective but are not proven in the traditional tracks. Unfortunately, the education, skills and knowledge of regulators are unlikely to keep pace with rapidly changing technologies. Thus, decisions made by humans are increasingly less efficient in the creation and implementation of regulations.

A better regulatory regime may be one that describes the expected outcomes in quantitative terms and let technologies, that satisfy such end points, to be automatically approved.

Chandra’s coma

Recent observations from NASA’s Chandra observatory that shows the enormous scope of the Coma cluster of galaxies leave the amateurs dumfounded. The features of this epic structure, spanning over half a million light years, cannot be easily explained. The marriage of at least two giant elliptical galaxies has resulted in a structure of fantastic scale, held in shape, apparently by gravity.

The observation of such structures, ironically, raises more questions than answers. The paradoxical information loss in a black hole, sometimes explained away by the pasting on the surface, leading to the possibility of the universe being a hologram, may need to be revisited. The question is whether peeking into the past is a fruitful activity – does it provide new information or just cloud already established ignorance?

It may be time to look to the future, for the past is too dull or inexplicable with available tools.

Rajan : Intellect to spare

As I walked up to the shabby building in downtown Chicago, battling the bone chilling wind from the lake in 1992, I was looking forward to Rajan’s class. I made the trip from Hyde Park in anticipation of new information and I was never disappointed. Albeit being contemporaries at IIT, my engineering path left me distinctly ignorant of economics and he gave me more than I was bargaining for.

Freshwater economics was refreshing as it provided a robust framework, not unlike the engineering I was used to. The young professor was already showing brilliance as he systematically explained traditional finance from 6 PM to 9 PM. My first peek into research was also instructive with an empirical study into decision-making in financial markets. I attempted to soak the knowledge in with unreliable results. It sounded interesting but it was unclear if managers in firms made decisions that way. Later,I would find that managers were worse, much worse.

The theory was clear – but in practice it turned out be nearly useless. Chicago’s tendency to be enamored by deterministic models is its Achilles heel, as it argued what should be without asking why it is not so. Not many make decisions discounting cash flows but most do calculate an NPV that is swept aside by decision-makers as either irrelevant or incorrect – and for good reasons. Decisions were never that simple – neither in companies nor in the macro economy.

It will be interesting to see if he can bring back an economy in shambles, driven to hell by socialistic and ignorant policies for over five decades.

Mad, fast and dumb

Recent research from the University of Miami warns that the emergence of the “ultrafast machine ecology,” – referring to algorithmic trading - may create more market crashes. This “predatory” behavior, the author argues, is reaching a stage of instability and may need to be regulated. These arguments, based mostly on an engineering view of financial markets seem to be suffering from a lack of understanding of what markets are. Assuming that regulation is the only medicine for any symptom is problematic for many reasons.

First, let’s look at what financial markets are for. They are set up for the trading of standardized paper that represent the value of real assets. Nobody is forced to buy or sell such instruments and markets fundamentally mean that anybody is able to buy and sell those at any time and ideally at any place. The rules that govern such markets are simple – everybody is allowed to analyze publicly available information and make decisions for herself. Granted, the simple rules – equal access to information, no insider trading and no preferential access to trading are not consistently implemented – but that is a different issue.

Second, application of technology to trade is an innovation – but such innovation has not resulted in risk adjusted excess returns (alpha). Nobody has cornered all the wealth in the world yet by algorithmic trading. So in spite of the mad, fast and dumb bunch that shout from the TV screens every evening, the many supercomputers and light years of cable wrapping around the exchanges and the brilliant physicists and mathematicians who fine tune the algorithms continuously – academic studies show that none of these create alpha. Finally, the presumption that “regulation” will solve these “problems” implicitly assumes that the regulators have perfect information to make the optimal rules. If the last decade is any indication, one cannot imagine regulators are that smart.

Analysis of financial markets and trading behavior based on engineering rules is unlikely to provide any insights. Further, assuming that regulation is needed over the application of emerging technologies for trading is wrong, philosophically and practically. It would be a lot better if regulators focus on implementing the rules that already exist consistently and sending the offenders to jail quickly.

An economic loss to society

The passing of Ronald Coase makes us poorer in our ability to conceptualize complex problems that affect society at large and solve them elegantly. He made two invaluable leaps in economics, while teaching law at the University of Chicago and those insights stood the test of time. “The nature of the firm",” survived through industrial revolution into information revolution providing a simple and complete framework to analyze and understand scale and scope of firms. He will repeat it again in “the problem of social cost,” with a clear articulation of the cost of blind government intervention, with normative prescriptions for auctions and allocations.

The elegance of these observations was astonishing and they left mere mortals, yearning for intellectual stimulation. It has influenced a wave of innovation in economic thinking under the umbrella of Chicago school, where frameworks based on a set of principles yielded tools with broad applications to every aspect of society. This ability to solve problems top-down, uncluttered by data and anecdotes, is a skill that is waning. In the contemporary world of “big noise,” where academics and practioners scramble to create and prove hypotheses, such insights are very rare.

A true economic loss to society - perhaps educators and policy-makers may take a moment to look back and see the brilliance.

Dropped call

As the world’s largest democracy attempt to grapple with the problems of its own creation, one has to wonder if the last decade was yet another failed start. From its recent independent beginnings, its incompetent leaders consistently made bad policies – from soft socialism to fully planned societies, with the hope that failed policies elsewhere will work in India. It should be clear by now, that they do not.

Three primary vectors have always held the country back. First, its political elite, with compassion clearly worn on the long sleeves of their home made garments, have always been corrupt – top down. Such a corrupt system simply cannot make optimal policies and a country that claims to be a democracy goes to the poll, mesmerized by a few last names as if it is in some sort of hypnotic trance, and keep electing the same corrupt and incompetent bunch. And second, the one-sided education handed out to the politicians from a few choice institutions in Europe, have sufficiently brain washed even those who may have wanted to do something good. And, finally – a disconnected set of kingdoms, packed into a country for the convenience of the World, still hoards endemic discrimination across classes, regions and sexes.

Central planning does not work, markets do. This simple idea is yet to penetrate those technocrats in charge, still burning the midnight oil to optimize resource allocation and to engineer optimal growth, as if they are the only ones who know how to drive a ship with over 1 billion people to their certain heavenly destiny. The basic idea that past performance is no indication of the future has never been explained to the entire country, that seems to cling to its illustrious past, as if godly intervention will return it to its past glory. It will not.

The prescriptions are simple – open markets, trade freely, shed cronyism, punish corruption and implement a true democracy. Opening markets means clear and consistent implementation of rules – those regulating market failures such as monopolies and those implementing fair taxation and minimal subsidies. Trading freely means it has to get stronger in areas of comparative advantages and not drive its educated populace to industries of fleeting cost advantages, afforded by a protected currency. Shedding cronyism means that it creates organizations that compete on merit and intellectual property and not those manufacturing profits by connections and handouts. Punishing corruption means that it has to get tougher on white collar crime and use powerful disincentives to remove this issue that is eating into its core. And, implementing a true democracy means that the system is able to understand available choices and elect representatives who are the best leaders, irrespective of where they come from and what their last names are.

It is a long shot.

Buggy OS

The rise of humans from available alternative biological systems has been ably aided by a robust Operating System (OS) design. The hardware, sported by the species, was never a head-turner, showing fragility, clumsiness and lack of power to move fast, climb high or lift heavy. However, the installed OS, compensated for these deficiencies, by allowing efficient use of memory, learning and pattern finding. However, on the downside, the OS appears buggy, thanks to ad-hoc evolutionary processes and random mutations.

For starters, at the core, logic processing appears volatile and seems to be prone to errors. To make matters worse, built in learning and error-correction facilities can and does go haywire, producing unexpected and unreliable outcomes. Since these issues are seen across the entire cross-section of humans, they can only be attributed to the OS itself and not the acquired applications. Early adoption of the next generation OS, perhaps thrust into the market by nature without sufficient testing, seems to have provided an edge early but the tight coupling of high level (but rather premature functionality) ended up in a less robust long-term design.

Humans may be sufficiently limited by a buggy and outdated OS. Newer and more powerful applications – education, culture and art - are unlikely to make a fundamental difference, if this is the case.

Teleported

Recent news that physicists at ETH-Zurich have successfully teleported a large number of qbits, albeit over a short distance, is welcome news for practical quantum computing and telecommunications. It appears that we are fast approaching a possible jump in the application of science, with a theoretical foundation laid down nearly a century ago – something that engineers and technologists have been waiting for many decades. Teleportation and quantum computing have the highest potential to transform the human psyche, currently lost in meaningless wars and less meaningful experiments.

Incrementalism, a disease of modern human societies, has been eating into the potential of humans, substantially lowered by ignorance, conformation, racism and politics. Only a leap in technology that can flatten the ego, wealth and timidity, has any chance of transforming the status-quo. This will not come easy as conventional education and contemporary industry favor less risky mediocrity – most propped up by connections, campaign contributions and charitable donations with tax-breaks. In this toxic pool of influence and 15-minute fame on TED talks, humanity has been held hostage by the blind and the dumb.

Only a leap in technology has any chance of freeing the mind and visualizing the future.

The puzzle

Who solves the puzzle of life, who tries and retries, who fails and starts all over again? Who understands and then forgets? Who begins and ends? Who thinks and dreams? Who starts and then stops, abruptly? Who catches the inevitable and drops it later? Who knows and is then left with the inexplicable? Who predicts and then is challenged by the unpredictable? Who sees and then is blinded by the light? Who listens and then waits for the inaudible?

Who faces adversity and grows from it? Who sees further than what can be seen? Who hears the sound of future and dreams again? Who understands the present and fight for the future? Who knows the unknowable? Who smiles and waits for the unexpected fortune? Who takes a turn and tumbles higher? Who waits for a better tomorrow and forgets a worse yesterday?

It is an interesting puzzle.

Suspended knowledge

A recent paper in the journal of Physical Review Letters, showing a new analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and hypothesizing how the constructs from the existing model – such as dark energy and Neutrinos – could be sufficient to explain them, is symptomatic of the common experimental problem, in which results almost always tend toward ex. ante expectations. This is now common in most scientific disciplines including Physics, Medicine, Economics and others.

Experiments have been useful for most of the scientific pursuit of humans. However, we are fast approaching a regime that has a critical level of knowledge that cannot be improved by experiments. Empiricism and experimentalism have contributed significantly to the acceleration of knowledge in the past. However, the alarming rise seen in confirmation bias in experimental results, across scientific disciplines also point to a level of knowledge saturation bounded by experiments. This is akin to an environmental change and if the human brain is not able to adapt to this new state of knowledge, it stands high risk of stagnation, or worse extinction.

One way to get around this stagnation is to increase the number of experiments designed specifically to disprove expectations. As the value of confirming experiments decline for knowledge creation, experiments that look for yet to be defined needle in yet to be defined haystack have to dominate. The problem, of course, is even in those cases, ex. ante expectations of the haystack and the properties of the possible needle will be corrupted by the status quo. It is possible that humans are unable to make a transition to the next wave of knowledge creation as the current education and industrial systems are simply unable to adapt to the new realities.

It will be sad if we experiment our way through finer and finer measurements of the non-existent, in a state of suspended and stagnant knowledge.

Social automobile

A recent study from Virginia Tech describes how unstructured textual information from online discussion forums and other social media can be mined to unearth vehicle defects. This, in turn, helps quality management professionals to predict impending problems, make decisions and proactively manage safety and quality. This is an area that merits further exploration.

There are two important vectors of possible future innovation here. First, portfolio information from social media, albeit being highly variable and unpredictable at individual level, contains valuable insights to aid decision support. One could imagine similar techniques to predict disease outbreaks and terrorist activities. It has been known that health and law professionals have been taking advantage of social media to support decisions. With improved technologies in unstructured text mining, these concepts can be further developed. In the long run, one has to believe that such technologies will become widely available to the consumers as well.

Second, it also showcases the importance of product quality for manufacturers as any lack of it will be internalized not just by the immediate customer but the populace at large, very quickly. For example, for automobile manufacturers, it is increasingly important that any possible quality issue is identified and corrected before the user of the vehicle knows and blogs about it. In essence, they have to build smart cars, able to self-diagnose problems and communicate them to the manufacturer. Additionally, the manufacturer has to be able to aggregate information at the fleet level to identify any looming quality issue before it affects the user adversely. We may be fast approaching the establishment of social channels for machine-to-machine communications. If manufacturers do not get ahead of this developing wave, they will be consumed by those who do.

It took thousands of years for humans to invent technologies to connect them all together, allowing the emergence of social intelligence. It will take less time for machines to do the same.

K-NEST

Recent simulation of NEST on a K Computer in Japan demonstrated a neural network close to 1% of a human brain. Although this is encouraging and point to the possibility of simulating an entire brain using exa-scale computers in the future, it also raises many questions as to the utility of programmatic simulation of the human brain. It has been a fascination for many ordinary men and women, for ages. A powerful quantum computer, housed in such an efficient space, standing ready to learn and forget, tantalized those who attempted to replicate it in-silica – but is has all been in vein.

Simulation of the human brain by traditional means, using raw computing power, is unlikely to produce insights into its workings. The brain is an efficient quantum computer, not something that possesses very high computing power and memory as measured by traditional computing metrics. Its specs are mediocre at best but it does have a highly sophisticated operating system, that is able to take advantage of its limited capabilities. In the absence of such powerful software, able to adapt to modular and learning apps, some able to reconfigure on demand, it will be less interesting. Failure of the operating system or some critical apps, render the brain incompetent quickly, regardless of its supposed hardware depth.

Sheer scaling of computing power and memory, although a straightforward experiment, is unlikely to yield the mysteries of this remarkable organ.

Free Marketability

A recent study in the International Journal of the Economics of Business shows that the European Climate Exchange (ECX) has been an efficient way to curb carbon emissions. Free markets, yet again, provide a simple and holistic way to price divisible and tradable benefits and dis-benefits to society. Free trading participants of a system are the most likely to impute efficient prices to outcomes and drive optimal policies. Ignorant politicians and paranoid scientists are unlikely to devise the best policies for society – worse, they make the situation worse.

More generally, society is in the best position to determine the price of an outcome for itself. Attempts at prescriptively driving policies either through the analysis of incomplete data or the adherence to political agendas by a few, will always result in worse outcomes. The basic idea that there is an efficient price to pollution is missing in these emotional debates. Since pollution affects society and its participants, only a large cohort of these participants, expressing freely could determine the cost of it.

There is a need to focus on two areas – first, market mechanisms, that will efficiently price any anticipated positive or negative outcomes to society, including pollution have to be prevalent with easy access to all participants and second, entities that manipulate prices have to be tried with the possibility of the highest penalty – they are engaged in crimes against humanity.

Unified, but not grand

A recent article in the European Physical Journal explains how the behavior of  a complex dynamical system could be explained by the superposition of simpler underlying systems. The work hypothesizes that special relativity and quantum-mechanical dynamics are mathematically identical to two interlocked processes operating at different energy levels.

Grand unification theories have been directionless for decades, attempting the impossible – some spawning particles and others energy fields, to plug the holes in improbable theories. They have been inventing strings, membranes and other such constructs, that would make a dress-maker blush but with little advancement in fundamental knowledge. The notion that complexity can be explained by superposition of simpler processes have been with us for decades as well, but that sounded too simplistic for the pretending geniuses behind ivy walls.

Simpler explanations to complex phenomena will always dominate even though it may not be sufficiently robust to prop up the ego of Nobel seekers.