Exactly. When our car doesn't run well, a car with perhaps 20,000 parts, we take it to the mechanic who says "yup, issue was your spark plug, fixed". And even then, of course, the car issue may have been multifactorial. Maybe the spark plug failed because the fuel/air mix was off, for example, the spark plug was the symptom.
But then we leap from the car with 20,000 parts to a body with a trillion cells each cell with a trillion molecules. The calculus of the fuel/air mix and the spark plug has now been blown out of proportion, as challenging as conceiving a 20 dimensional manifold or the size of the universe. And so my reservation with a paper like this, and in general, is people say, "yup, sure was the spark plug" and then get accolades and a Nature paper, when the core issue was the air fuel mix, the air fuel mix that is, times a trillion cells, times a trillion molecules.
And I can't blame the authors. No shame in shooting for Nature and succeeding. No shame in these simplistic models, each one takes us a step further. But somewhere along the lines we're going to have think about the R&D of the big picture in non-hand-wavey ways.
But then we leap from the car with 20,000 parts to a body with a trillion cells each cell with a trillion molecules. The calculus of the fuel/air mix and the spark plug has now been blown out of proportion, as challenging as conceiving a 20 dimensional manifold or the size of the universe. And so my reservation with a paper like this, and in general, is people say, "yup, sure was the spark plug" and then get accolades and a Nature paper, when the core issue was the air fuel mix, the air fuel mix that is, times a trillion cells, times a trillion molecules.
And I can't blame the authors. No shame in shooting for Nature and succeeding. No shame in these simplistic models, each one takes us a step further. But somewhere along the lines we're going to have think about the R&D of the big picture in non-hand-wavey ways.