What sort of physics calculations can you do within a cell? I would have expected the data structure for a cell to contain a handful of scalar parameters (e.g.

What sort of physics calculations can you do within a cell? I would have expected the data structure for a cell to contain a handful of scalar parameters (e.g. temperature, pressure, humidity, velocity vector) related by a few scalar equations - a negligible amount of computation. It sounds like there's quite a few orders of magnitude more stuff going on within a cell than I would have expected. What am I missing?