Physics of Finance as an Interdisciplinary Field: A Critical Approach to the Contributions of Physics to Finance

The book, Physics of Finance, reviews the historical story of interactions between physics and finance. The author of the book describes how models of physics focus on financial issues in an intertextual way and seeks to demonstrate the proliferation of physical models in finance and how the quantitative analysis of Quants (quantitative financial analysts) - as an antecedent of the 2008-2007 financial crisis or not-, will shape the future of financial knowledge. In this paper, while introducing the whole structure of the book, its various aspects of form and content are criticized based on the concepts of intertextuality and interdisciplinary studies. The intertextual approach is a level of analysis that examines the relationship between physics (as text A) and finance (as text B), and the interdisciplinary view is a level of analysis that describes their relationship as two distinct disciplines. These two disciplines have their own subject, method, and purpose. Following these studies, the main advantage of the book are the narrative form, the historical, precise look, and its main drawbacks are to ignore the clear critique of behavioral economists and other quantitative financial critics into financial physics.