Comment by jcranmer

> Could a competent software engineer, even without knowing the fundamental origins of things like particle masses or the fine-structure constant, capture all known fundamental interactions in code?

I don't think so.

In classical physics, "all" you have to do is tot up the forces on every particle and you get a differential equation that is pretty easy to numerically work with. Scale is a challenge all of its own, and of course you'd ideally need to learn about all the numerical issues you can run into. But the math behind Runge-Kutta methods isn't that advanced (really, you just need some calculus to even explain what you're doing in the first place), so that's pretty approachable to a smart high schooler.

But when you get to quantum mechanics, it's different. The forces aren't described in a way that's amenable to tot-up-all-the-forces-on-every-particle, which is why you get stuff like https://xkcd.com/1489/ (where the explainer is unable to really explain anything about the strong or weak force). As an arguably competent software engineer, my own attempts to do something like this have always resulted in my just bouncing off the math entirely. And my understanding of the math--as limited as it is--is that some things like gravity just don't work at all with the methods we have at hand to us, despite us working at it for 50 years.

By way of comparison, my understanding is that our best computational models of fundamental forces struggle to model something as complicated as an atom.