Your Royal Society rightly commemorates the successes of the natural sciences. Many of these successes have been achieved because the problems of physics often involve objects large enough to be studied individually – the motion of the earth, for example. Or components small enough to be subject to statistical regularities – we can never predict the behaviour of an individual molecule or electron, but there are so many molecules and electrons that for most purposes it does not matter. Many of the phenomena we deal with in economics and business fall in between – the units of analysis are individualistic but also too numerous for their idiosyncrasies to be individually understood.
皇家学会(Royal Society)恰如其分的代表着自然科学的成就。许多成就之所以能够取得,是因为物理学问题所涉及的对象往往大到足以对其进行个体研究,例如地球的运动;或者这个对象的成分小到足以受统计学规律的支配——我们永远无法预测单个分子或电子的行为,但组成这个对象的分子和电子是如此之多,以至于对大多数课题而言,单个分子或电子的行为并不重要。而我们所研究的许多manbetx20客户端下载 学和商学现象正好介于两者之间——分析的单位是个体的,但其数目过多,以至于无法理解每一个个体的特性。