In the past four years econophysics has become a very popular field among young physics graduates. In discussions I have had with a number of them who visited me I was struck by the fact that for most if not all of them the main objective seemed to be the construction of a (possibly unified) theory. Usually my reaction was to point out that this is precisely what most economists have been trying to do in the past decades and that one of the reasons which may explain their little success was probably the meagerness and inadequacy of the body of evidence on which these theories were erected. In truth, the conviction of these students simply reflected what physics had become in the second half of the twentieth century, namely a highly successful but also strongly structured and more and more theoretically oriented science. It is symptomatic of that trend that some of the most advanced researches concern grand unification and string theories, that is to say two fields which have (so far) little connection with experimental evidence.

Fortunately the “first generation” of econophysics mostly came from statistical physics, a field in which there is a closer link between theoretical and experimental work. On average at previous econophysical conferences at least 80 percent of the models were compared to some kind of statistical evidence. Such a comparison can be made in different ways however. In the early days of thermodynamics a number of basic experiments (such as those by Joule or Boyle) provided firm guide lines and foundations for the establishment of that new science.