It would take a whole essay to describe this, but the situation is comparable to the crisis in astronomy that led to the Copernican Revolution, and by analogy, shares features of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, in which the act of measuring something changes the thing being measured.

I'm almost afraid to get into this topic since I really don't have the answer - just a different perspective on the problem - something I've been working on for years. Still, before you can make any progress in a discipline you have to ask the right questions - questions which typically appear as a result of a failure of existing models - a problem which is very evident in Economics.

I'll try to put more flesh on these bones in a few days - right now I'm rather busy with the pagan tree festival and the ton of snow that just fell on us. I'll just say that when analyzing markets and the economy, I try to draw on material from outside the sphere of economics, one of my key inspirations being the work of Douglas Hofstadter, especially his book Godel, Esher, Bach.

ebear, you certainly have piqued my curiosity, so i hope you follow up on this some day. your method of picking stocks sounds a lot more sophisticated than mine, i.e. throwing darts at a stock listing. i wish you luck in using particle physics in your efforts, but after reading your post a half dozen times, it reminds me of lectures when i was in college and i would look up at the ceiling in the hope that i could see all the stuff that was going over my head.

good luck with your research. i have already finished shopping for the pagan tree festival, and we don't have snow where i live, so it looks like i have more time on my hands than you.