Three decades ago, investor Dean Williams began a speech with an analogy between physics and investing.
For centuries, Williams said, physics was dominated by Newtonian physics, or classical physics, which taught us that the world moved in predictable ways that were measurable and precise. Give me a ball and a ramp, and I'll tell you how far that ball will roll. All you have to do is measure something now, and it will tell you what will happen next.
But then a new type of physics came around -- quantum physics. It told us that parts of the physical world were more messy and imprecise than we once thought possible. Measuring something now might not tell us what will happen next, because we don't really know what we're measuring, or if merely looking at something is causing the event we're trying to measure.
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