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The other reason the answer to this is "no" is that we don't even really understand how an atom even works its entirety yet. We don't know fundamentally know wh

The other reason the answer to this is "no" is that we don't even really understand how an atom even works its entirety yet. We don't know fundamentally know what makes the potential energy of an atomic nuclear be structured in the way it is. EDIT: I thought I'd double check that since it's been a while since I studied physics formally; apparently it is possible to model light nuclei[1] (up to four nucleons) from the ground up now! [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_initio_methods_(nuclear_physics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_initio_methods_(nuclear_p... [1]

adastra22 3y ago
You are confusing exact solutions with the ability to solve. We know how atoms work and can solve for any property we might want to measure. Ab initio systems aren't very practical for large systems because of computational costs, but they would work if given infinite compute (or a quantum computer). We just solve them numerically instead of closed-form. It's like polynomials: there's a quadratic formula, and a cubic and even quartic formula for exact solutions (although the quartic is ridiculous and no one would ever use it). Higher order polynomials have NO exact, closed-form solutions using standard arithmetic operations. But we can still solve any polynomial no matter the degree using numerical methods. To say that we don't even know how how degree 5 polynomials work would be flat out wrong.