Comment by sheepscreek

If you're talking about things at the equivalent level of say, finding out if positrons maintain symmetry with electrons for their magnetic moment, then yeah - I hear you. Or if you wanted to research some unknown behaviour of hot plasma at 15 million C, you can't do that in a simulation.

..or can we?

Humour me for a moment. Maybe simulating to the degree that was necessary for cutting edge work was not possible earlier, when humans had to program each and every thing in the system that could affect the result. But with current gen petaflop-on-your-desk level compute + swarms of agents that can work tirelessly to account for every known thing to humanity, maybe the threshold has been pushed far enough to produce some more meaningful discovery work in simulation?