Molecules don’t run on bits

A flask is full of atoms sharing electrons. That is not a pile of off-and-on switches. It is the same family of physics as the machine on Mira’s poster.

An ordinary computer stores bits, each one a 0 or a 1. To guess what a molecule will do, it grinds through an enormous number of possibilities one step after another. Sometimes the printout is close. This morning it was not. That miss is not always a bad chemist. Sometimes the question is simply the wrong shape for the machine.

Weather models, payroll, and browsers are not that shape. They stay on ordinary machines, including huge ones. Asking the poster to “do weather faster” is the faster-laptop story again.

Lesson 1 was a count that doubles. Lesson 2 was the same kind of tool getting better. This lesson is a different kind of machine, and the reason it matters is in the flask.

The tempting mistake is to skip to miracles, a whole drug this term, because the big computer failed once. The honest hope is smaller: a tiny piece of a molecule, with the limits said out loud.

That is what lets you ask what job the minutes are even for.