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Re:Explain It to Me Again, Computer by Retric on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @07:16AM (#5285139)
QM says nothing about the validity of your simulation. Worse we are incapable of simulating something as complex as a single helium molicule using the full QM model for 1 second using 1 days computing power on any current supercomputer. Even protean folding is forced to greatly simplify what's going on to the point it's often wrong. ( Proteans are not folded in a vacuum.)

Want to simulate a cell? Even with hardware 10^100 times faster you can't use QM, it's all models of models. None of which are 100% accurate, but that's no reason you can't Kidd yourself.

Re:Explain It to Me Again, Computer by Xcelerate on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @07:50AM (#5285223)
Am I missing something or did you not read the post you replied to?
Re:Explain It to Me Again, Computer by Retric on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @02:52PM (#5288026)
From a practical standpoint Chemistry is not based on QM. You basically said QM > Chemistry > more complex things, my counter argument is even fairly simple. Chemistry is way to complex to model from pure QM. So, even at your first step your model is making simplifications. And 10^100 times the processing power does not get you to the point where you can model even the simplest cell for a meaningful time-frame.

Even at the timescales of atomic explosions and the best hardware / software around those models are vary simplified.

PS: That's not to say you can't make useful simulations, but trusting them to be accurate without testing is not science.