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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Science Memes
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and then some bozo says that biology is just complicated chemistry and chemistry is just complicated physics and we can simulate physics
curious thing is that i never hear biologists or chemists saying that, only some physicists and techbros. just trying to simulate your way out of small organic chemistry problems will make you even more hopelessly lost than you were before
I mean the relation between those isn't wrong but like... we can't simulate complicated physics. At least not at any reasonable speed.
some people would tell you that we can simulate small bits of chemistry but it's flat out wrong (i might be biased as i've wrangled for a year with computational chemists about results that don't conform to reality) and even then errors are so large that's it's useless
I was involved with a project trying to simulate growth of a crystal cluster a couple of years ago. The guy doing the coding said it would be easy. It never worked and never came remotely close.
in my case the size of the system was so small they didn't have that excuse, yet they were only ever able to get correct results after experimental data was handed over to them, zero predictive power, useless
Ah, the innocence of inexperience. (Giving them the benefit of the doubt of course. )
I work on old undocumented c/c++ spaghetti code for embedded systems. In multiple planning meetings I have gotten to use lines like "this looks like a single character change but testing it makes me really nervous" and have gotten zero pushback or raised eyebrows.
It's usually a few laughs and often another engineer or our manager will chime in to agree with me and describe some more of the context or whatever, lol.