We present a simple agent-based model to study how the proximate triggering factor of a crash or a rally might relate to its fundamental mechanism, and vice versa. Our agents form opinions and invest, based on three sources of information, (i) public information, i.e. news; (ii) information from...

``Disorder-induced volatility'' (DIV) describes the enhanced fluctuations of collective behaviors exhibited by bistable systems in the presence of a rapidly fluctuating external signal. At the DIV resonance, a defining characteristics is that the response of the system becomes uncorrelated with...

We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of...

This short review presents a selected history of the mutual fertilization between physics and economics, from Isaac Newton and Adam Smith to the present. The fundamentally different perspectives embraced in theories developed in financial economics compared with physics are dissected with the...

Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse'', facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to rejuvenate the nuclear energy industry to overcome the...