Sometimes It Takes a Physicist

I'm usually one of the first to spout off about the Dow Jones Industrial Average being too small and imperfect of an index, but be that as it may, there's a new twist on reading it, which of course could be applied to the other stock indices with no loss of generality or somesuch. The all-too-obvious how-long-ago-were-we-first-here sorta rule, bar-charted. Why didn't I think of that? Oh, yeah: no treat was in the offing...