Chemistry is like... a game of football
Whatever the predictions, you won’t know for sure until the final whistle, says Tom Husband
Football is a great analogy for science. Physicists determine the natural laws by which matter and energy interact. In the same way, the rules of football dictate which behaviours are permissible, which events score points and so on. Football players would obviously represent biology. But what makes chemistry like a game of football?
In the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the character Leonard tells a joke about a farmer whose chickens are not laying eggs. A physicist offers to help, measures and analyses some data, and finally says: ‘I have a solution, but it only works for perfectly spherical chickens in a vacuum.’ Scientists simplify phenomena to make them easier to understand, but as real life is never so simple, the resulting models have limitations in what they can accurately predict.
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