There do not seem to exist many reasons that can justify why the later discoverers must be punished to pay money to others in order to use the mathematical relations that they have discovered themselves, even if by some chance someone else happened to discover the same relations earlier.įor mathematical discoveries, there are little grounds to claim that the first discoverer should be able to recover any expenses, as most of the strictly necessary expenses are just in the salaries of people and it is very difficult to estimate what percentage of those expenses had actually contributed to the discovery. Using mathematics in chemistry allows a significant reduction in the number of chemical experiments that must be done to discover anything new, but they cannot be eliminated yet.Īny discovery in mathematics can be easily redone again, by someone else, completely independently, and this actually happens extremely frequently.
There are no truly "ab initio" mathematical predictions in chemistry. In theory, not even the computer is needed, as you could do everything with pen and paper, but it might require years or centuries.Ĭhemistry is an experimental science for now, until someone would find a method to solve the equations of quantum mechanics for non-trivial systems.Ī lot of mathematics is used in chemistry but at its base chemistry remains experimental, because all the mathematical models used in chemistry to predict some facts use a large number of model parameters that have been determined experimentally. To discover anything in mathematics, including a new video compression algorithm, you do not need anything else, except a computer. There are essential differences between chemistry and mathematics.