[johncagula]

"...our understanding of the laws of physics is advanced enough nowadays to describe almost perfectly everything we observe in everyday life." -- nope.

(sorry for the sheepish comment but this thinking is dangerous; look into some of the current problems in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology)

[darkmighty]

What's about those that we can't describe? Some of these effects are very computation-intensive, but doesn't mean their basis isn't well understood already.

[acadien]

>very computation-intensive

This is a gross understatement and fallacious. Many of the problems being studied today would take millions/billions/trillions of years of computation in order to model... with approximations. Using even the largest clusters on the planet we can't even find the ground state of even the smallest protein (with ab-initio). DFT scales cubically with system size, and DFT is an approximation to actual first principles calculations that are impossibly enormous and can never be fully calculated.

The number of systems we can accurately model is minuscule, the number of open problems in computational chemistry and materials science is enormous.

[Xcelerate]

> impossibly enormous and can never be fully calculated.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

A quantum computer can handle the fermion sign problem by scaling polynomially with the number of particles instead of exponentially. Estimates for if/when such a practical device will be created vary wildly but I would think the possibility of this, along with new techniques that take advantage of the redundancy inherent to certain categories of problems and efficiently diagonalize the Hamiltonian could accelerate the rate at which we can handle larger and larger systems. It's kind of hard to predict what breakthroughs will be made, but I'm staying optimistic.

EDIT: Then again, looking at your posts on here, I suspect you already know all that ;)

[selimthegrim]

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=177...