A financial physics themed cartoon by physicist and cartoonist Randall Munroe, used to mock the 2013 The Physics of Wall Street by James Weatherall. [1]
In human physics, financial physics, a subject sometimes taken as a synonym of econophysics, is the subject of physicists studying financial market, using the tools and techniques of physics.
History In 1863, French economist Jules Regnault (1834-1894) published his “Calculations of Chances and Philosophy of Trading”, said to have been strongly influenced by the social physics of Adolphe Quetelet, and in doing so developed a version of what has been called “financial physics”
In 1900 French mathematician Louis Bachelier, in his The Theory of Speculation, built on the work of Regnault, to use a random hypothesis to treat securities prices similar to gas molecules, moving independently of each other, with future movements being independent of past movements, hence starting the field of econophysics, according to some classifications.
References 1. Weatherall, James O. (2013). The Physics of Wall Street: a Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2. (a) Brown, Aaron. (2012). “The Physics of Wall Street: the Most Arrogant Book in the World?, Dec 17, MinyAnville.com. (b) Weatherall, James O. (2013). The Physics of Wall Street: a Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 3. Ghosh, Asim. (2013). “Econophysics Research in India in the Last Two Decades” (pdf), ArXiv, Aug 26.
