Computation vs knowledge in materials innovation

Abstract 

The title above reflects a statement by David McCullough, who said, ”Information is a wonderful thing, but it is not knowledge. You wouldn’t be educated if you managed to memorize the entire encyclopedia. You would be weird” [1].

Paralleling this theme, the theoretical physicist, Volker Heine, once said, ”How often have I read a paper about a piece of computational physics which finishes with the words ’and we obtain good agreement with experiment.’ If you know the answer from experiment, I want to cry, why are you wasting so much time calculating it?” Why indeed?