Can a physics major get hired as a software engineer?

[Fra]

If you come up with a model ... that works only under situations X, Y, and Z, people will forget about the limits.

This happens in physics too :) I'm thinking in particular to theories that are well established for small subsystems, and then are extrapolated to cases where all you have are inside observers.

What I mentioned about evolving law is supposed to cure exactly that. Ie. a theory of finance is NOT a "descriptive view", where you sit at your office in inifinite and throw in a buck and find 3 buck coming back as a curve ball. I think the correct view, that finance people are well aware of (but that physicists don't quite get, beucase they are too stubbonr lookig for fundamental DOFs and theories that might in fact not exist) is that the theory is just a interactiong tool, a tool to help your business. If your business luck, the theory is questioned and modified. so the interesting perspective there (which I thtnk is the same is social theory) is that the laws evolve. Or rather there are not even any fundamental LAWS', all there is are expectations of laws. This is also different that some classical game theory where the game is well defined and the state space of strategies are fixed.

A real game, is one where the rules are fuzzy and evolving, and trying to infer the rules is as important as trying to place your bets rationally acccording to them.

I think aloto fo this is gut feeling for people in finance and social theory, so maybe physicists can learn something.

/Fredrik

 

[Pythagorean]

In analysis of complex system, you generally test the "robustness" of a system's behavior before you can publish "facts" about it. Some behaviors can remain through a whole range of parameter tunings and perturbations, so that you can often ignore problems that chaos may cause. Straight numerical errors will hardly ever give you reasonable results, so they're generally very red-flaggy (emptys, infs and nans, oh my)

"Robustness" is very similar (and perhaps based on) the definition from evolution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_(evolution )

Robustness of a biological system is the persistence of a certain characteristic or trait in a system under perturbations or conditions of uncertainty.