Your handle is wonderfully ironic!!!
Econophysics
By CHRISTOPHER SHEA Published: December 11, 2005
Victor Yakovenko, a physicist at the University of Maryland, happens to think that current patterns of economic inequality are as natural, and unalterable, as the properties of air molecules in your kitchen.
He is a self-described "econophysicist." Econophysics, the use of tools from physics to study markets and similar matters, isn't new, but the subfield devoted to analyzing how the economic pie is split acquired new legitimacy in March when the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, in Calcutta, held an international conference on wealth distribution.
Econophysicists point out that incomes and wealth behave suspiciously like atoms. In the United States, for example, beneath the 97th percentile (roughly $150,000), the dispersion of income fits a common distribution pattern known as "exponential" distribution. Exponential distribution happens to be the distribution pattern of the energy of atoms in gases that are at thermal equilibrium; it's a pattern that many closed, random systems gravitate toward. As for the wealthiest 3 percent, their incomes follow what's called a "power law": there is a very long tail in the distribution of data. (Consider the huge gap between a lawyer making $200,000 and Bill Gates.)
Other developed nations seem to display this two-tiered economic system as well, with the demarcation lines differing only slightly.