The Moorad Choudhry Anthology, + Website

Afterword

The business of what we call “finance” is as much art as science. Actually, there are grounds for saying that it isn't really a science at all, in which case finance would be just art. In a scientific discipline, theories are (or should be) tested rigorously under controlled conditions and results observed so that the theory can be either proven or disproven. Precision and accuracy are cornerstones of the process, and if a result cannot be replicated exactly by another practitioner under a similar set of circumstances elsewhere then it remains an unproven theory. For instance, mathematical models used in physics produce the same results every time. There isn't any variation depending on who applied it or what country it was applied in or what time of day it was.

Consider, for example, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. It was launched on 2 March 2004, and on 6 August 2014 it reached its intended destination, the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which was at that point approximately 317 million miles from Earth. The spacecraft went into orbit around the comet. But that wasn't all – part of the spacecraft, the Philae lander, detached itself and performed a soft landing on the comet, which of course wasn't exactly a stationary target – the comet was travelling at around 84,000 miles per hour. Philae transmitted pictures back to Earth before its battery ran out.

Now that is “rocket science”. Engineers and mathematicians had to programme all this into the spacecraft ...