Originally Posted by Ken G

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Now, granted we never achieve a full explanation in science, there is always a "but why" question that we will not be able to answer using science. But we do pretty well at unifying and simplifying, at training our thinking to find some kind of underlying structure or logic. That is exactly what "cloud computing" does not need to do, and does not know how to do. It reminds me of when you go to astronomy meetings, and you see countless observer papers showing some observation, and countless simulation papers showing that some complicated set of equations can induce a result that looks like the observations. And that's it, that's all you see-- everyone goes home happy. Except me-- to me, the whole point of a simulation is not to stop when it agrees with observations, but rather to think of that as the starting point. The value of a simulation that "works" is you can than analyze it, to figure out what happened that was actually simple. It's a form of intellectual laziness to skip that crucial followup.

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