Did anyone else respond? I thought it might be an interesting discussion. The article points out the limitations of experimental science but it discounts the cleverness of future researchers. The example of randomly finding the perfect reagent among a large number possibilities sounds a bit like saying there's no clever way to purify or predict what the reagent should be. With computational chemistry becoming increasingly predictive and projects like the clean energy screen saver it is probably be possible to sort through the molecules. Why spend the the time is another question. There's a lot of ways to use a million computer hours but what's worth the effort? A comment Garnet Chan said was in physics there are problems like the superconductivity or dark energy that all physicist think about in the back of their minds, whereas in chemistry the problems are very spread out. JDW J. D. Whitfield Aspuru-Guzik group Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University tel: (301) 520-7847 web: aspuru.chem.harvard.edu/People/James_Whitfield On Aug 23, 2010, at 10:38 AM, Dmitrij Rappoport < rappoport(a)chemistry.harvard.edu&gt; wrote: Hello everyone, There is a recent paper in Nature Chemistry entitled "Uncertainty in Chemistry" by Fredric M. Menger, a synthetic organic chemist, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.799 which makes the claim that there are things in chemistry, which are experimentally unknowable, like the molecular structure and dynamics of all molecules in a polymer sample. And since simulation can only reproduce known experiments and is not always trustworthy, so the argument goes, there is a range of potentially important questions which are unanswerable. I was thinking that, since we have so many people from different backgrounds in our group, wouldn't it be interesting to discuss it in one of the upcoming group meetings and perhaps even write some response to it? I would imagine that there are several interesting angles to this question such as connections to complexity theory, questions about modeling vs. prediction, etc. Let me know you are interested and perhaps we could have a discussion about this in one of the upcoming group meetings. Cheers, Dmitrij --------------------------------------------- Dr. Dmitrij Rappoport Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University 12 Oxford St. Cambridge, MA 02138 phone: (617) 496 8221 fax: (617) 496 9411 email: rappoport(a)chemistry.harvard.edu -------------------------------------------- _____________________________________________ Aspuru-list mailing list Aspuru-list(a)lists.fas.harvard.edu http://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/aspuru-list