But oftentimes theoretical chemistry is not as important as what we get out of experiments because unlike physics, which attempts to derive general laws of nature, chemistry has to deal with the nitty gritty of the diversity of actual miscroscopic interactions of things. Any theory that is not entirely rigorous or even has slight room for an exception will be ignored by necessity, and physics is chock full of such examples. Biology is in a certain sense better (since it deals with larger things) and in a certain sense worse (as it relies on dogma and mysticism, at its essence, to explain the systems of life), and still nobody has gone beyond Aristotle and Kant in giving anything close to a rigorous definition of life as such.

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gmueckl 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Where is physics chock full pf exceptions?

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isomorphic_duck 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

how does biology depend on "dogma and mysticism"? I am really curious - a Google search yielded nothing much relevant.

	▲	nemothekid 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think he's being a little facetious - what he probably means is that if you attempt to get any true scientific rigor of that is going on in biological or chemical systems you end up facing the limits of physics in being able to explain what is going on. So rather and try to have scientific rigor, you just accept things the way they are and memorize the outputs and if anyone asks "why is it like that", your answers are either: * Because God said so * Find out yourself and get a nobel prize Either way, even if you don't know what the answers are, you can still do serious work at a higher level of abstraction.
	▲	AngryData 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would think just because everything is so cumulatively complicated and interconnected that if you tried to trace a line through a complex biological processes and explain it all you will end up with 1,000 PhD thesis topics to figure out and thousands more you just hadn't noticed yet. And at the end of the day none of that might be all that useful for describing the larger process at work. So at some point when someone ask "Why does X do Y" you gotta just settle on "because that's the way it is" and move on.

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breezybottom 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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