This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe publication of The Black Swan (Taleb, 2007) by a statistician and investment risk analyst, N. N. Taleb, introduced the (anti-) theory of the randomness and the centrality of uncertainty to a wide audience about to be shocked by the scale and suddenness of a global financial crisis that few anticipated and many believed would never occur. In 1997 the Nobel Prize in Economics had been awarded to two authors, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton for their profit-maximising trading strategy which ‘proved’ that trading in derivatives could be both lucrative and safe. Taleb disagreed strongly, warning that uncertainties defied est...