Science, Meta-physics and Trading

Discussion in 'Psychology' started by WDGann, Apr 6, 2003.

  1. CalTrader

    CalTrader Guest

    Tell us about Bells inequality: what do you understand about it ?

    Back on track with this thread ... The relationship of science to trading is IMHO that I can use the tools of mathematics and various other disciplines to analyze and construct models of various markets and how they interrelate: I can also measure the validity of my models from real data.....
     
    #31     Apr 7, 2003
  2. Forget about Saynt...

    The whole point of the thread is how each trader, applies their knowledge(minimal or not) to trading.
     
    #32     Apr 7, 2003
  3. You are mixing philosophy with science. Nature is intrinsically uncertain in the sense that you can make only probabilistic statements and there is no way to get around this. That's what science says. Whether this will ever change remains to be seen, but this is not because our understanding is incomplete and not final yet. It always is such, but with the probabilistic picture of quantum mechanics and all that follows from it we get a more complete and consistent understanding of the quantum world than we could get without it. The probabilistic picture of quantum world is the only one that Nature allows us to have, whether we will ever have a better/different picture is unknown and cannot be decided by philosophical arguments. We will simply have to discover it first.

    You may want to read a few books on QM (as for instance the two I suggested in this thread). Metaphysics and philosophy are no substitute for science although they do play some role in scientific thinking.
     
    #33     Apr 7, 2003
  4. Any books you would recommend?
     
    #34     Apr 7, 2003
  5. CalTrader

    CalTrader Guest

    If you really want to start to understand QM the two best books that I know of are Modern Quantum Mechanics, J. Sakurai, and The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, P.A.M. Dirac.

    Actually, science frameworks are not so much probablistic as they are scale specific: some theories work really well over a specific length or time scale: change the scale too much and they dont work very well and indeed we need to supplant one set of ideas for another. There are however, some ideas which are not dependent on a specific range for their validity. These types of ideas are usually the most fruitful with respect to spawning new ways to look at exisiting framwworks/theories of how things work ....
     
    #35     Apr 7, 2003
  6. I mentioned two in this thread already. Let me repeat this for your convenience:
    1. Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert
    2. The Infamous Boundary by David Wick

    Both are very suitable for an educated layman and will give you a better picture of the fundamental difference between the uncertainty of measurements in the classical world where you are limited only by the precision of your apparatus and this in principle can always be improved and the uncertainty of the quantum world which is due to the fact that the observer interferes with what he observes in a way that affects his observations. This is what essentially leads to the Heinsenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics. In the classical world in which we practically live such interference bears no effect on what is observed.

    You will learn more about it from these two books.
     
    #36     Apr 7, 2003
  7. These are books for physics majors, they may not be appropriate for someone whose background in math is limited, although Sakurai, as far as I recall it, starts from the very basics of mathematical formalism. They are good for those who want to know how to practically apply QM. To understand it, it's enough to start from something less academic. Also, Dirac does not discuss the very modern aspects of QM, such as the Bell Theorem and I am not sure if Sakurai does it, probably not.
     
    #37     Apr 7, 2003
  8. there is absolutely nothing in the stock market that is 100% scientific, and attemtps to turn stock trading into a pure science are futile.
     
    #38     Apr 7, 2003
  9. is

    'The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics' by R.I.G. Hughes. I happened to get a copy signed by the author.

    This is a book for those who are not afraid of mathematics, yet the math formalism is introduced in a very simple way. The book can be suitable for philosophers, in fact, R.I.G. is a philosophy professor and not a physicist per se, although his understanding of QM is very good.
     
    #39     Apr 7, 2003
  10. The most remarkable thing about Nature is that it can be understood at all. In principle, there is nothing 'scientific' about it, yet we can understand it in terms of science. Whether Nature is 100% 'scientific', that is if it can be completely understood by science remains to be seen and we may never know this for sure, so the stock market does not differ so much from Nature in this respect because we do not know if Nature is 100% 'scientific'.
     
    #40     Apr 7, 2003