Best Selling Books by James Owen Weatherall

A look inside the world of “quants” and how science can (and can’t) predict financial markets: “Entertaining and enlightening” (The New York Times). After the economic meltdown of 2008, Warren Buffett famously warned, “beware of geeks bearing formulas.” But while many of the mathematicians and software engineers on Wall Street failed when their abstractions turned ugly in practice, a special breed of physicists has a much deeper history of revolutionizing finance. Taking us from fin-de-siècle Paris to Rat Pack–era Las Vegas, from wartime government labs to Yippie communes on the Pacific coast, James Owen Weatherall shows how physicists successfully brought their science to bear on some of the thorniest problems in economics, from options pricing to bubbles. The crisis was partly a failure of mathematical modeling. But even more, it was a failure of some very sophisticated financial institutions to think like physicists. Models—whether in science or finance—have limitations; they break down under certain conditions. And in 2008, sophisticated models fell into the hands of people who didn’t understand their purpose, and didn’t care. It was a catastrophic misuse of science. The solution, however, is not to give up on models; it’s to make them better. This book reveals the people and ideas on the cusp of a new era in finance, from a geophysicist using a model designed for earthquakes to predict a massive stock market crash to a physicist-run hedge fund earning 2,478.6% over the course of the 1990s. Weatherall shows how an obscure idea from quantum theory might soon be used to create a far more accurate Consumer Price Index. The Physics of Wall Street will change how we think about our economic future. “Fascinating history . . . Happily, the author has a gift for making complex concepts clear to lay readers.” —Booklist

“Empowering and thoroughly researched, this book offers useful contemporary analysis and possible solutions to one of the greatest threats to democracy.” —Kirkus Reviews Editors’ choice, The New York Times Book Review Recommended reading, Scientific American Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. “[The authors] deftly apply sociological models to examine how misinformation spreads among people and how scientific results get misrepresented in the public sphere.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American “A notable new volume . . . The Misinformation Age explains systematically how facts are determined and changed—whether it is concerning the effects of vaccination on children or the Russian attack on the integrity of the electoral process.” —Roger I. Abrams, New York Journal of Books

The New York Times bestselling author of The Physics of Wall Street “deftly explains all you wanted to know about nothingness—a.k.a. the quantum vacuum” (Priyamvada Natarajan, author of Mapping the Heavens). James Owen Weatherall’s bestselling book, The Physics of Wall Street, was named one of Physics Today’s five most intriguing books of 2013. In this work, he takes on a fundamental concept of modern physics: nothing. The physics of stuff—protons, neutrons, electrons, and even quarks and gluons—is at least somewhat familiar to most of us. But what about the physics of nothing? Isaac Newton thought of empty space as nothingness extended in all directions, a kind of theater in which physics could unfold. But both quantum theory and relativity tell us that Newton’s picture can’t be right. Nothing, it turns out, is an awful lot like something, with a structure and properties every bit as complex and mysterious as matter. In his signature lively prose, Weatherall explores the very nature of empty space—and solidifies his reputation as a science writer to watch. Included on the 2017 Best Book List by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “An engaging and interesting account.”—The Economist “Readers get a dose of biography while following such figures as Einstein, Dirac, and Newton to see how top theories about the void have been discovered, developed, and debunked. Weatherall’s clear language and skillful organization adroitly combines history and physics to show readers just how much ‘nothing really matters.’”—Publishers Weekly

A book which reveals the people and ideas on the cusp of a new era in finance... After the economic meltdown of 2008, many pundits placed the blame on "complex financial instruments" like derivatives, and the physicists and mathematicians who dreamed them up. But a young academic named James Owen Weatherall quickly began to question this narrative. Were the physicists really at fault? In this important and engaging book, Weatherall tells the story of how physicists came to Wall Street and how their ideas changed finance forever. Taking us from fin-de-siècle Paris to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, from wartime government labs to Yippie communes, he shows how physicists successfully brought their science to bear on some of the thorniest problems in economics, from options pricing to bubbles. The trouble is that models-whether in science or finance-have limitations; they break down under certain conditions. And in 2008, sophisticated models fell into the hands of people who didn''t understand their purpose, and didn''t care. It was a catastrophic misuse of science. The solution, Weatherall argues in this brilliantly entertaining book, is not to give up on models; it is to simply make them better.

«Weatherall racconta l''affascinante storia di come la nostra concezione del nulla sia cambiata nel corso dei secoli, fino ad arrivare alla moderna teoria quantistica dei campi e alla gravità quantistica.» Sean Carroll, autore di «Dall’eternità a qui» «Perché esiste qualcosa anziché il nulla?» Sollevata a più riprese dai filosofi nel corso della storia, questa domanda assume un valore del tutto inaspettato nelle mani di un fisico. Per Newton, per esempio, era necessario che esistesse uno «spazio», un palcoscenico in cui potesse svolgersi il «dramma» della materia e delle sue leggi: questo spazio era teoricamente «vuoto» e veniva occupato dai corpi fisici, che vi subivano «forze» precise. Attorno a questo nacque un lungo e famoso contenzioso con Leibniz, e i primi problemi – filosofici e fisici – sul concetto di spazio. Con Maxwell le cose si fecero ancora più problematiche, dal momento che la nascita del campo elettromagnetico riempiva lo spazio «vuoto» di «qualcosa» la cui natura non era chiara, e peggiorarono radicalmente con Einstein e il suo spazio-tempo curvo, che per potersi curvare doveva pur essere qualcosa. Il colpo di grazia all’idea di vuoto lo diede infine la meccanica quantistica. Per quanto strano possa sembrare, insomma, il «nulla» è «qualcosa», come mostra questo libro splendido e coinvolgente nel rispondere dal punto di vista della fisica alla più profonda di tutte le questioni: la distinzione tra essere e non-essere, tra ciò che esiste e il nulla.

Tras el estallido de la crisis en 2008, muchos supuestos expertos señalaron a los complejos instrumentos financieros, y por ende a los matemáticos y físicos que los habían creado, como los culpables de la catástrofe acontecida. En este libro se narra cómo los científicos llegaron a Wall Street a principios de los ochenta y cómo sus ideas transformaron las finanzas para siempre. En un apasionante recorrido que va desde el fin-de-siècle parisino a Las Vegas del Rat Pack, desde los laboratorios del Pentágono a las comunas hippies, Weatherall expone cómo la banca de inversión empezó a contratar a científicos para que lidiaran con las cuestiones matemáticas más peliagudas, desde los precios de la acción a la detección de posibles burbujas. No obstante, ya sea en ciencia o finanzas, los modelos se hunden bajo ciertas circunstancias o condiciones. Y en 2008, sofisticados modelos financieros cayeron en manos de gente que desconocía su uso y finalidad. Un hecho de nefastas consecuencias.

There is a long tradition, originating with Aristotle, of philosophers interested in the nature of unforced motion. How do bodies move in the absence of any external influence, and why? The modern answer to the "how''" half of this question is the subject of Newton''s first law of motion, which states that in the absence of any external forces, a body traverses a straight line at constant velocity. Newton''s first law, however, does not appear to provide an answer to the "why" half of the question. Indeed, many physicists and philosophers of physics, Einstein included, have held that this question cannot be answered until one moves to general relativity---and more, that general relativity is distinctive among spacetime theories precisely because it "explains" unforced motion, in the sense that the geodesic principle---the geometrical version of Newton''s first law---can be proved as a theorem. In this dissertation, I argue that Newtonian gravitation provides an explanation of inertial motion almost identical to that of general relativity. However, the details of both cases are remarkably subtle, and considerable attention must be paid to the sense of "explain" being used. Four chapters of the dissertation are devoted to these considerations. The final chapter of the dissertation addresses a slightly different topic. In standard Newtonian gravitation, there are two distinct notions of mass: "inertial mass" and "(passive) gravitational mass". Yet it is an empirical fact that for any body, the values of these masses are always equal. Historically, many physicists have taken this fact to call for explanation. A natural place to look for an explanation of the coincidence of inertial and gravitational mass would be general relativity. In general relativity, however, there is no coherent notion of gravitational mass. This chapter shows how it is that gravitational mass arises as a distinct property of matter in the Newtonian limit of general relativity, and moreover, shows that in any model of standard Newtonian gravitation that approximates a model of relativity theory (in the sense of being a limit of a sequence of relativistic spacetimes), inertial and gravitational mass must be equal.