Four hundred years ago today Galileo Galilei brought forth a new instrument.  On 1611 April 14 Galileo did a demo of his telescope in Rome.

That bit of glass changed our view of the universe.

He saw four moons orbiting Jupiter.  This was good evidence that the universe did not revolve around the earth.

Here are some things that he didn’t see:

Figure 1: Death spiral. He didn’t see galaxies — collections of billions of stars.  And he certainly didn’t see a pair of stars interacting to spew dust over trillions of kilometers.

Figure 2: Carina nebula.  Not even Galileo could have imagined something as awesome as a nebula.

The state of finance

The state of our knowledge of finance is akin to Galileo barely making out the largest moons around Jupiter.  There are likely to be phenomena far beyond what we can currently conceive.

But we need telescopes to see them.

Questions

I think that random portfolios are one way we can see farther into finance.  What are other possibilities to advance us?

Epilogue

The figures are courtesy of NASA and ESA.  More details can be found on them at The Top 14 Astronomy Pictures of 2010. When you go there, have a look at the “Lunar hole in one”.