|
|
|
|
 |
Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
Write to us at:
(address is not clickable)
2/18/2005
Nullius in Verba, by
James Sogi
As the Temple of TA comes tumbling down at Smith Barney and the high priestess is banished, what better time to look at the history of the speculative sciences. Nullius in Verba, was the 17th century Royal Society of London 's motto, Don't take anyone's word for it. The society had such distinguished members as Newton, Bacon, Hook, Halley who celebrated the scientific method, sought to deflate ballyhoo, and rejected appeals to authority. They lived in a time when the European languages lacked words or concepts for some of the concepts they were developing. Descartes suspected mechanical demonstrations of hyperbolic and elliptical functions such as sails, or the line traced by a pencil in a circle as it rolled, or the ellipses drawn by a string on two foci. He lacked the conceptual framework and the mathematical concepts to grasp what was before his eyes. Their math did not allow use of the infinitely small. Science in the early 17th century lacked the language or the mental framework to understand the heavenly phenomena before their eyes nightly as their concept of velocity was just beginning with a knot line tossed over board a sailing ship.
We see many obvious things in the market each day, but struggle to make workable hypotheses and tests to advance the speculative sciences. Do we possess sufficient concepts to understand the market? It took over 1000 years to deflate Aristotelian ballyhoo. We still cannot explain what gravity is. Are speculators like ancient mariners believing the world is flat? Are we missing obvious explanations of market machinations for lack of an adequate conceptual framework. The work here is an advance and will carry forward. The answers need not be exact as rocket science, for even Newton only sought to calculate "pretty nearly". Time is the father of truth. The testing of market hypotheses will continue. The results will remain suspect until disproved according to the scientific method.