Large Scale Simulations

Abstract

Computer simulation has the history of 50 years. Its contribution to Science is indeed enormous and fruitful. Above all, significant is the fact that physical processes of nonlinear phenomena now become rather easily elucidated. Increase of simulation results that demonstrate nonlinear processes of observed phenomena in terms of fundamental laws has contributed decisively to finalizing modern western science based on reductionism. Nevertheless, simulation has not yet acquired real civil right as a self-supporting scientific methodology. This is mainly because the very tool of simulation, computer, remains not satisfactorily big enough. Because of this restriction of the capacity of available tools, simulations are used principally to explain only the direct physical causality of an individual observed phenomenon, not the global environmental evolution that bears the phenomenon. In other words, simulation can never be regarded as an independent, self-contained methodology of science that can cultivate a new field by itself, but remains an auxiliary and passive tool to observation and theory.