"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 3 Oct 2014 10:38:52 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

The physical sciences are strictly deterministic (don't start with
me
about Schrodinger's cat, please g). Advances in those sciences
comes
primarily from finding out what the determinants are, and how they
relate. Once those are revealed, the relationships prove to be
mostly
extremely simple and consistent.

Economics may be deterministic but, at the fundamental level, it may
be impossible ever to uncover all of the determinants. Or there may
be
a randomness for which it is mathematically, scientifically,
improssible to uncover the determinants. In other words, there may
be
no intellectual distinction between randomness and the
finest-grained
determination. In the case of economics, that's largely because it
depends on the actions of people -- often hundreds of millions of
them
-- and neither biology nor psychology is anywhere near determining
the
causes of behavior behind any single one of those people. That is,
at
the level of weather prediction: predicting an individual, local
event.

The thermodynamics of chemical reactions deals with extensive (vs
intensive) and indeterminate complexity and randomness. Like economic
and social phenomena, every reaction that can possibly happen has some
probability that it will, in both directions, and they are influenced
by surrounding conditions on both micro and macro scales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_energy
"First, it is often unclear as to whether or not reaction does proceed
in one step; threshold barriers that are averaged out over all
elementary steps have little theoretical value. Second, even if the
reaction being studied is elementary, a spectrum of individual
collisions contributes to rate constants obtained from bulk ('bulb')
experiments involving billions of molecules, with many different
reactant collision geometries and angles, different translational and
(possibly) vibrational energies-all of which may lead to different
microscopic reaction rates."

It's not a subject that can be explained simply, without math which
quantifies the benefits both parties to a transaction receive, their
risk tolerance (activation energy, temperature) and their occasional
irrationally random behavior, or Entropy.

-jsw