Ah… I’m talking about stat mech in a broader sense than I think you’re imagining. The central problem of the field is the “bridge laws” defining/expressing macroscopic behavior in terms of microscopic behavior. So, e.g., deriving Navier-Stokes from molecular dynamics is a stat mech problem. Of course we still need the other sciences (chemistry, geology, etc) to define the system in the first place. The point of stat mech is to take low-level laws with lots of degrees of freedom, and derive macroscopic laws from them. For very coarse, high-level models, the “low-level model” might itself be e.g. fluid dynamics.
I think you’re eliding how much work is involved in what you described as...
Yeah, this stuff definitely isn’t easy. As you argued above, the general case of the problem is basically AGI (and also the topic of my own research). But there are a lot of existing tricks and the occasional reasonably-general-tool, especially in the multiscale modelling world and in Bayesian stat mech.
Yes, I don’t think we really disagree. My prior (prior to this extended comments discussion) was that there are lots of wonderful existing tricks, but there’s no real shortcut for the fully general problem and any such shortcut would be effectively AGI anyways.
Ah… I’m talking about stat mech in a broader sense than I think you’re imagining. The central problem of the field is the “bridge laws” defining/expressing macroscopic behavior in terms of microscopic behavior. So, e.g., deriving Navier-Stokes from molecular dynamics is a stat mech problem. Of course we still need the other sciences (chemistry, geology, etc) to define the system in the first place. The point of stat mech is to take low-level laws with lots of degrees of freedom, and derive macroscopic laws from them. For very coarse, high-level models, the “low-level model” might itself be e.g. fluid dynamics.
Yeah, this stuff definitely isn’t easy. As you argued above, the general case of the problem is basically AGI (and also the topic of my own research). But there are a lot of existing tricks and the occasional reasonably-general-tool, especially in the multiscale modelling world and in Bayesian stat mech.
Yes, I don’t think we really disagree. My prior (prior to this extended comments discussion) was that there are lots of wonderful existing tricks, but there’s no real shortcut for the fully general problem and any such shortcut would be effectively AGI anyways.