Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by marcosdumay on Friday July 10, 2026 @07:40PM
(#48866781)
The physics that predicts chemistry is about 100 years old. Almost nothing people study up to high-school is that recent, and that modern physics tends to be really hard.
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Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday July 10, 2026 @08:27PM
(#48867137)
> physics that predicts chemistry
Do we have this?
Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by gus_massa on Friday July 10, 2026 @09:18PM
(#48867546)
Yes but ... after a few not so mild assumptions, it takes exponential time to solve it. In this case, you need 6 electrons in 2x5 orbitals for the Carbon and 82 electrons and 2x43 orbitals for Bismuth- (perhaps more, I usually work with lighter atom). So now the free parameter are Combinatoric(96,88)~=3E13 and you must construct a matrix of [3E13 x 3E13] and then find the minimal eigenvalue. So you must make a lot of simplifications and more assumptions to get the result before the universe dies.
And this is for a very cold isolated molecule like in this experiment. If you have many moving molecules surrounded by a lot of water molecules at a usual room temperature, it gets much much much worse.
Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by marcosdumay on Friday July 10, 2026 @08:53PM
(#48867360)
You know that people simulate chemistry on computers, right?
Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by JumpCrisscross on Friday July 10, 2026 @09:05PM
(#48867459)
Yes. We also simulate cosmology and quantum systems and play Sims.
Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by marcosdumay on Friday July 10, 2026 @10:17PM
(#48867952)
The difference being that the chemical simulations get the correct answers on most conditions. And probably the few they miss are because of the simulation limitations, not of the underlying model.
Those other simulators aren't there to tell you the result. Instead people put the result in to find how the simulation behaves in cosmology, and don't care about them in Sims.
Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by jandrewrogers on Saturday July 11, 2026 @02:00AM
(#48869199)
More or less, but it is profoundly computationally intractable even in relatively trivial cases. Trying to do this was one of the earliest use cases for supercomputers. It is genuinely a “boiling the ocean” type problem.
Practical attempts use a lot of heuristics and approximations, which risks fidelity.
Re:Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy eleme...
by zweifuss on Saturday July 11, 2026 @01:37PM
(#48873976)
As said before, the physics for chemistry is 100 years old (Schrödinger/Dirac), but the N-body Hamiltonian is an exponential beast. Scaling to just 1mg (~10¹⁹ particles) hits the "Exponential Wall."