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I like your screen name, we must chat sometime about trading.

Anyway, in physical processes that do not involve free will of humans, I suspect you are correct that in the long run, equilibrium process prevails. For example, an avalanche is a chaotic process, while slowly sliding down the mountain is equilibrium. In both cases, the snow gets to the bottom.

But rapid climate change could be devastating to the humans as opposed to gradual change. A gradual warming can be handled, a quick global warming could be catastrophic. In both cases, you get to the same place, but a chaotic change would be a difficult thing to handle.

In chaotic systems that involve human free will, chaos and equilibrium do not always get to the same end result. A financial panic can destroy a lot of basically sound companies and institutions which never come back to where they would have been under equilibrium conditions.

Thanks for you interest. I don't really apply much other than a heuristic fractal model to my trading. I am very much a believer in Graham and Dodd value investing, with an added cowboy streak in terms of bets involving long term trends and indexes.

You have to realize that the Academy's prime mission in the post World War II era has been to gain funding for its labs. The easiest way to do this is to create scare tactics to bring in research dollars.

In the 70s and 80s, we were supposed to be on the verge of global cooling, and now global warming is the call. My favorite is new, post hoc theories which say that global warming theories predict exactly that we should have had such a long, cold, and snow -laden winter. Of course, it fits the facts!

I don't believe in financial panics. I believe that the market sometimes has major changes which can be explained by an understanding of the fractal nature of the world around us. I refer to these as the "Noah Effect," after the deluge. I also believe that long term trends, such as bull and bear markets that are part of the underlying speculative processes under what is known as "Fractional Brownian Motion," which is also labled as persistency, 1/f noise, and the "Joseph Effect", after biblical passages.

Please feel free to Freep Mail me if you would like a further discussion.