Processing Knowledge

The turn of the century is considered a golden era of physics. Richard Feynman was one of the physicists born during this era. His quotations are widely used by bloggers, and authors of various news articles. One such quote is,

” There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” — Richard Feynman.

Various meanings of economical:

The word economical has many meanings, one such meaning is  “of pertaining to the national or regional economy”, another meaning is “guarding against waste of unnecessary expense or avoiding waste”.  Sadly the current financial crisis seems to be following the definition given by Richard Feynman more than 2 decades ago!

What is currently economical?

The article on investment opportunities shows that investment opportunities only in the infrastructure sector is about 1500 billion dollars which is 15 times the number of stars in the galaxy. These numbers which were once considered astronomical are now been talked of routinely as economical numbers. Crunching such numbers is relished by economists, applied mathematician and applied physicists who are many a times considered the fore-fathers of the financial mathematics stream. The current financial turmoil seems to be following the butterfly effect.  In these situations what is coming next can only be predicted by financial analysts who are scholars such as Feynman who once quoted,

“Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?”