Epstein Secrets

have the advantage." Claude Shannon [Tribus & Mclrvine 1971]. I find the last quote very reassuring. In my own opinion, though less well known than Einstein, Von Neumann ranked close to Einstein in terms of genius. Like Einstein, he didn't merely bring in a single profound new idea; but seemed to change

st is in that of finance. The earliest work on random walks was that done by the mathematician Bachelier on stock prices. Bachelier's work predates Einstein's own random walk model of Brownian motion. For half a century Bachelier's work was largely forgotten. The use of random walks in finance was rekin

intuitively wrong. In most of the things that humans count, more is better, while with entropy less is normally better. In later sections I follow Schrodinger in using the concept of 'negentropy' (negative-entropy) to get round this problem. The important point of the energy/information debate is that the

nd demand. In Handbook of Financial Markets: Dynamics and Evolution, ed. T Hens, KR Schenkhoppe, pp. 57-130. Amsterdam: Elsevier Bray A, Graham 3, Harvey C, Michaely R, 2005. Payout policy in the 21st century. Journal of Financial Economics 77,483-527. van den Berg H, 2010. Mathematical Models of Biolo

d 'common sense' and simply worked out the mathematical consequences of this fact. Thus was relativity born. Economists seem to prefer the route of Einstein's peers, forever producing more complex theories to substantiate the existence of a hypothetical aether. Science can not be built simply on common

the question of what is negentropy. Erwin Schr0dinger first introduced the concept of negentropy, in his 1944 popular-science book 'What is life?' [Schrodinger 1944] and it was used in the discussion of living systems. Schrodinger explained his use of this phrase: if I had been catering for them [physicist

determined by phenomena that lie well beneath the surface of our experience—phenomena that don't rely in any way upon our existence. In this sense, Einstein was wrong: "God" does appear to play dice with the universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But like playing at the craps table, our luck

ot implemented. Novel ideas generally stagnate and die without the courage to implement them. I bring this up here because perhaps the true mark of Einstein's ge- nius was not his mathematical prowess (although, contrary to conven- tional wisdom, he was mathematically talented), but his creativity and hi

ple for whom quantum mechanics seems to offer hope of a world where any dream, no matter how outlandish, is realizable. Other familiar names, Bohr, Schrodinger, Dirac, and later Feynman and Dyson, each made great leaps into the unknown. But they weren't alone. Physics is a collaborative discipline. Too oft

quantum craziness of reality was taken by an unlikely explorer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. In one sense, Dirac was the perfect man for the job. As Einstein is re- puted to have later said of him, "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful! When I think of Dirac, an old jok

These electrons have, on average, velocities that are a fair fraction of the speed of light, and to describe them, we must use Special Relativity. Schrodinger's equation worked well to describe the energy levels of elec- trons in the outer parts of simple atoms such as hydrogen, where it pro- vided a quantu