Greg, The current situation is more extreme than what went on in the past. In the past one would get people who were trained in math, or physics, or engineering, who would then switch over to economics and import their methods from their previous background. But they would actually switch over formally to economics. Today we have a quite different sociological situation going on. A lot of these people are fully practicing physicists, in physics departments, not switching to economics. Furthermore, much of this literature is being published in physics journals that are not indexed in the JEL, with the upshot that most economists are not even aware that it exists. Some of these journals include Physica A, European Physical Journal B, and Physical Review Letters E. One finds grad students getting Ph.D.'s in physics whose topics are physics models being applied to financial time series. (BTW, Physica A is edited by H. Eugene Stanley, widely recognized as the neologizer of the term "econophyics" a bit over a decade ago). I do not think we have ever seen anything like this before, and I suspect that it is not a stable (or long-run equilibrium) situation. My more expanded views on this are contained in my New Palgrave entry on Econophysics, available on my website at http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb. Barkley Rosser