Physics have very important problems like reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity or "what is dark matter?" So what are the big unanswered questions in chemistry?
>>16537557>what are the big unanswered questions in chemistry?How they can become a real science like physics.Seriously though, there are a number of long-standing questions about protein-folding and about the chemical processes of the origin of life.
>>16537557How to do anything without failing 40% of the time
>>16537557a ton of things in chemistry are just empirical, theres no theory behind most of them. People will cope and say than in principle you can simulate everything from a soup of quarks and fundamental interactions but thats bullshit. Like you are going to solve a quntillion quintillion coupled differential equations, all of them quantum, to calculate how much salt can dissolve in a volume of water.Because as of today its not known why salt (by salt i mean sodium chloride) dissolves in water up to a certain concentration. People also handwave tales about polarity and shit that doesnt help you calculate the acual saturation percentageIt reminds me of the situation where these ancient persians or indians knew about Newton's third law of motion in a philosophical way but were unable to calculate anything like real objects trajectories so nobody cared.
>>16537557Could just google Theoretical Chemistry and get an answer immediately.Without looking up anything, my guess would be theorizing the properties of higher elements
>>16537557https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_chemistry
>>16537557Why meth is illegal and sacharin is legal, if they are same kind of dangerous.
>>16537749Chemistry is just being reclaimed by physics ATM. The moment we nail down density functional theory or QVEs is the moment the entirety of chemistry just becomes a subbranch of condensed matter physics.
>>16538313>The moment we nail dAny minute now.quintillion quark simulation coming through
>>16537749Chemistry is interesting only if it's biology related. Kino.
>>16537929I think you've lost your way, /sci/ is not /x/. this way:
>>16538313>The moment we nail down density functional theory...I've been hearing this from CMfags for fifteen years, almost always followed by them complaining about DFT predicting blatantly wrong chemical reactions or that fucking copper doesn't behave like a metal or some shit.
>>16538389Meta-GGA functionals have hit a dead end and any new AI "improvements" are necessarily not ab-inito. We need new ab-initio functionals.