Originally posted by @eladarYou figure all the supercomputers in the world are useless? The current computer champ is Chinese with the US playing catch up, swapping #1 and #2 for years now.
As I said, you have a computer do your work for you, then people around here to help you describe it.
Supercomputers, literally millions of times faster than Humy's computer can simulate a good slice of the entire universe, calculations that could NEVER be done by hand no matter how many physicists and mathematicians were put on that job.
If you have a box of particles in a vacuum all floating around you might be able to give a rough estimate of the positions of the particles given enough time, on paper, but if you have a hundred particles to account for it gets exponentially harder to compute the interactions. A million particles, forget it. That's where super computers shine, able to do work not even close to possible for humans, no matter how many and no matter how long they worked at some problem like that.
Modern supercomputers do computations in parallel with literally thousands of CPU's and memory units all interconnected and tackling a piece of the problem. There is a whole branch of computer science devoted to parallel operations, getting the best result using many individual CPU's working together.
The problems physicists work on nowadays go way past the ability of humans to calculate without computers.