One of the most interesting and infuriating aspects of physics is that there are <i>soooo</i> many orders of magnitude between all the phenomena of interest, between the Plank scale and the smallest subatomic interactions, and between atoms and the size of things that we care about, even such things as &quot;viruses&quot; and &quot;proteins&quot;, to say nothing of getting up to the macroscopic scale. And beyond that, even taking macroscopic phenomena and trying to understand things at a planetary scale or beyond can be difficult. There&#x27;s about 60 orders of magnitude between the smallest things we&#x27;re interested in (Plank distance) and the largest (observable universe). Holy cow. The mind boggles.<p>It isn&#x27;t a contradiction to point out that we seem to have a very, very good model of the universe&#x27;s most fundamental particle processes, but still can not simply derive from that model to even very simple things of interest. In principle, we could &quot;just&quot; simulate the standard model and &quot;just&quot; simulate a lot of water molecules under the conditions of interest and &quot;just&quot; watch what happens. In reality, that turns out to be many, many orders of magnitude more computation than we can do.<p>See also protein folding, where even without trying to run things all the way down to the standard model, things that we in principle fully understand require gobs of computation to <i>approximate</i> for what are in the real world simple things happening gazzilions of times per second in every living organism.<p>In the other direction, witness the difficulty we have trying to improve our understanding of how the universe works at the Plank scale. One imagines that if the smallest things we had were not multiple orders of magnitude larger than the scale we are trying to study that perhaps we&#x27;d have made more progress by now, but it&#x27;s like trying to determine the rules of biology when the only capability you have is the ability to sling planets at each other really hard and see what happens. The miracle is that we&#x27;ve learned anything at all.<p>On that note, I&#x27;ve often wondered if the standard model really &quot;works&quot;. Suppose someone with a lot more simulating power than us actually programmed it in directly and set it running, with a reasonable initial state that resembles our world. (My understanding is that inflation doesn&#x27;t necessarily come out of it so we can guess that you can&#x27;t just start from the big bang.) Does it really work? Is the result indistinguishable from the real world without a particle accelerator? Or is there some flaw that only comes out at scale, or does the universe crash if you create a black hole? How close are we, really? If someone waved a magic wand and said &quot;Shazam, the standard model is now what the universe really and truly runs on!&quot;, would we notice anything different? Or would we be instantly dead because it  turns out chemistry doesn&#x27;t <i>quite</i> work right? Or perhaps at all?