[verisimi]

> How did we figure all this stuff out?

> We don’t yet have the technology to just observe all of the activity inside a living cell. That Goodsell painting above that shows the crowded cytoplasm packed with proteins is an artistic composite—backed by rigorous research to be sure—because there’s no way to capture all the different players in situ at once.

> A group at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne uses atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulations, in software, to understand structural details

> It’s a world that’s hard to see; sometimes you just have to imagine what’s going on down there, and back up those imaginings with the right experiments.

> One reason I’m particularly attracted to studies of E. coli chemotaxis is that it’s an early star of what’s been called “in silico” biology. It’s been the subject of many computer models.

Honest, at least.

[burnished]

Yeah I always appreciate that, I hate it when people shy away from honesty because they think some heckler won't understand the subtlety of the observations at play.

[verisimi]

You realise of course that models can be wrong. The map is not the terrain. Models are not reality. The observations here are on models.

If I knock up something in excel, and other people use that thinking it is how things are, but do not refer to the reality the model represents because there is no way to do that, how useful is the model?

Have you ever looked at old medieval beastiaries? Information is being relayed, but how useful is it?

https://alexanderadamsart.wordpress.com/2019/07/30/the-besti...

Without a means to view the underlying thing the model is meant to represent, to check and correct one's misunderstandings, how useful can the model be?

[burnished]

You ask good questions but act like you already know the answers which is really unfortunate.

you are mixing up models and simulations. A simulation can be a great way of exploring something unknown if you understand the rules in enough granularity. Models can be judged by their ability to make accurate predictions. Electrical engineering depends on both a great deal, I expect you agree that it is useful as a field given the method of communication we're using.

[infinite8s]

All models are wrong, some are just less wrong than others.

For chemotaxis, while they can't observe the underlying processes directly, they result in phenomena that are observable, which can be compared with the same phenomena predicted by simulations and models (the same is true of all scientific fields).