Can economies or financial systems violate the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy?
Along with a number of scientist friends, I have noticed that economists and financial experts (analysts, investors, pundits) frequently make statements that sound a lot like they believe that the basic physical units of economies – in particular money – can be created out of nothing, which would violate the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy (matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed). Some of us have observed that economies seem to be claimed capable of violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which, for the sake of argument, is very similar to the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy. For example, people have literally said that money can be made from nothing without being contradicted. The existence of financial derivative markets seems to bear this out. To the scientists with whom I have spoken, this ability to literally create something out of nothing seems, to say the very least, extraordinary and difficult to reconcile with our own observations of how
