"The Newspeak for this young field is "Financial engineering". So called is a new department at Princeton, and numerous less-illustrious but equally half-baked programs of study. "Engineering", with its long tradition and professional strictures for grappling with the exigencies of unforgiving matter and its cold equations, redolent of cantilevered bridges and steam engines, bespeaks solidity, exactly what this field lacks. "Financial engineering" is like developing a theoretical model for the design of bridges (in weightless conditions, since gravity introduces unnecessary complications), so that vast structures were being constructed, and explained away when towers and bridges collapsed as merely confirming the model, because we discovered that the builders skimped on the materials, and anyway, there must have been a misunderstanding, since we never really meant the structure to be built on Earth "