The Fungibility reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Fungibility

Fungibility is a premise according to which all instances of a given commodity are considered interchangeable.

In finance, fungibility refers to the ability of one security to be easily converted into another related security. For instance, stocks are often listed on several stock exchanges, and a fungible stock would allow you to exchange the shares purchased on one exchange for shares on another. Not all securities are fungible in this way, but those that are are somewhat more liquid and protected from volatility on one particular exchange.

In international relations, the term fungibility is usually applied to the power of states. International relations theorists who believe that power regard different types of power as reinforcing each other. For example, if power is fungible, then a state can translate its economic power into military power, and vice versa. A major debate in international relations is the degree of fungibility between hard power and soft power.

In Does God Play Dice? The New Mathmatics of Chaos, the mathematician Ian Stewart argues that fungibility applies to science as well. The example he uses is that subatomic particle theory is fungible when studying molecules "provided it led to the same general feature of a replicable molecule."

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