When I moved from physics to computers, I thought a fundamental difference is that in computers you can have a fundamentally deeper understanding of everything which happens in them – because you constructed them and could (at least in theory) observe every detail.
Well, today I heard a talk about ‘Vertical Profiling’, which means profiling of application behavior not only in the application level, but also the library, virtual machine, OS, hardware etc levels. And I understood in how many different places optimization (virtual machine, OS, hardware) is taking place, and how non-deterministic everything becomes by that. Performance characteristics (as function of time) become ‘emergent phenomena’ by that … To understand what is going on when an application runs, needs now careful observation of various performance measures on the different levels and correlation between these – by special instrumentation points and experimentation.
Actually, I guess this makes it similar to physics now …
Could that tell us something about physics and reality?