And chemistry??? Its mostly brought into the picture to talk about stoichiometry, the study of the rate and equilibria of chemical reactions. Still, what?
Your classic, well-behaved, homogeneous chemical reaction between perfectly miscible liquids or gases has a system of equations with forms like:
dAdt=γ1B+γ2CD−γ3AE2+...
etc, where each term is a reaction rate that either adds or subtracts from A (for example here B is something that decays into A without any other product, C and D react together to form A, but then A reacts with two E and becomes something else… etc). This by the way is exactly also the sort of system of differential equations we use for epidemiology (and that are also used in social sciences for things like belief spread across networks etc). This kind of model is generally very straightforwardly solved numerically, and doesn’t offer much complexity. Fun fact, you can also write a simple “mean field” model of Conway’s game of life this way; but that example also drives home the fact that this kind of model is only an idealisation. In reality, for example in Conway’s game of life, incredible complexity can emerge when these reactions are constrained by position (for example, a bunch of liquid non-miscible reagents on a plate that can only interact on their boundaries). So I can see how there would be potentially complex chemical systems that are very useful analogues for other systems in other domains.
Your classic, well-behaved, homogeneous chemical reaction between perfectly miscible liquids or gases has a system of equations with forms like:
dAdt=γ1B+γ2CD−γ3AE2+...etc, where each term is a reaction rate that either adds or subtracts from A (for example here B is something that decays into A without any other product, C and D react together to form A, but then A reacts with two E and becomes something else… etc). This by the way is exactly also the sort of system of differential equations we use for epidemiology (and that are also used in social sciences for things like belief spread across networks etc). This kind of model is generally very straightforwardly solved numerically, and doesn’t offer much complexity. Fun fact, you can also write a simple “mean field” model of Conway’s game of life this way; but that example also drives home the fact that this kind of model is only an idealisation. In reality, for example in Conway’s game of life, incredible complexity can emerge when these reactions are constrained by position (for example, a bunch of liquid non-miscible reagents on a plate that can only interact on their boundaries). So I can see how there would be potentially complex chemical systems that are very useful analogues for other systems in other domains.