Wrong Steps

When I was an early teenager, I remember I had a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a geologist. I quickly gave up on this idea when I decided that nothing could be more boring than thinking about a bunch of static rocks. Plus, I knew a geologist and he seemed pretty boring to me.
I am now starting to think that giving up on geology may have been a mistake.

I think my idea that rocks are static was wrong. Its all a matter of perspective. Sure rocks may look like they don't change or move, but that is because I am measuring them in terms of my own short human perspective. If the earth is more than 4 billion years old, then that is plenty of time for a rocks to do a lot of cool stuff. Plus - as recent events in Japan show, occasionally rocks move a lot, even in our time frame.
I sometimes think that if rocks were sentient beings, their sense of time would be so long that we would never recognize them as sentient, and conversely, the rocks would never recognize us as sentient. They would say, "How could anything with such a short lifespan develop consciousnesses?"

But the real reason I'm starting to think I wrote geology off too soon is that I now keep finding that a lot of geologists think interesting things that don't strictly deal with rocks. I'm sure I mentioned before about geologists modeling earthquakes with networks and power laws (Pareto distributions) [cool stuff!]. I have also mentioned the book Why Stock Markets Crash by Sornette - a professor of geophysics [financial cool stuff]

Today I went through a forgotten corner of my bookshelf and I stumbled upon a book I bought many years ago. It is called Chaos Theory Tamed by Garrett Williams. The great thing about this book is that while it goes into a lot of the math of chaos theory, it tries to teach the theory along the way, not just present it. The writer really seems interested in sharing the what he thinks is a cool subject with his readers. And low and behold, they guy was a retired geologist/hydrologist.

When I got into finance, I figured I had stumbled into an intellectual nirvana. I now see financial theory as hidebound and static, especially compared to what I am reading by geologists. I wonder if it is because financial theory is really geared around making money today - or tomorrow - and the fact that given its short time perspective it is bombarded by too much information. Geologist on the other hand take a long view.