alt Hacker NewsBut 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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how does biology depend on "dogma and mysticism"? I am really curious - a Google search yielded nothing much relevant.
> and still nobody has gone beyond Aristotle and Kant in giving anything close to a rigorous definition of life as such
You stopped reading after the 1800's? Schrödinger told us life is what feeds on negative entropy and that is pretty good.
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I think that as you ascend the scale of complexity, and just system size, then necessarily empiricalism and rote learning/memorization has to take over from more reductionalist explanations.
Physics, whether at atomic level, or on a much larger scale, is simple enough that reductionism usually works and you can calculate behavior from first principles using a few memorized "laws"
Biology is well past the point of complexity where you can do this most of the time, unless perhaps you are at the level of aspects of cellular behavior that can be analyzed in terms of chemistry.
Chemistry is in-between physics and biology in terms of complexity. In simple cases chemistry can be explained in terms of physics, but as AlphaFold has shown when you get to a certain level of complexity (in this case protein folding) empiricism takes over and you need to perform experiments and memorize results.
I think modern science and philosophy has a reasonable understanding of what life is, even if you disagree. This is certainly more a matter of philosophy than science, but it seems the best definition of life is based on the ability of a system to actively maintain a boundary between itself and the external world, thereby combating the 2nd "law" (statistical tendency) of thermodynamics. Maybe an interesting/useful definition (which is somewhat arbitrary) also needs to involve something like consuming energy/resources from the environment.