Nanoscience and the Janus-faced Character of Simulation

Abstract

In nanoscience, simulations (partly) take the place of real experiments. For example: in a simulation, well-known physical laws can produce surprising be- haviors. It is argued that simulations are both part of experimental practice and form a theoretical instrument, inducing a methodological shift in scientific practice: if one desires a quantitative understanding of matter at the nanoscale, one must rest con- tent with the ability of simulations to imitate systems and cannot ask for more direct means of validation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.