A joke along these lines has the math professor claiming that the proof of some statement is trivial. They pause for a moment, think, then leave the classroom. Half an hour later, they come back and say, "Yes, it was trivial."

On behalf of chemicals everywhere, I say: Screw you! Where would you be without us?

As Monsanto (and some of my user friends :-) ) tells us, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible."

More seriously, this post voiced some of the things I've been thinking about lately. It's not that it doesn't all reduce to physics in the end, but the reduction is complicated and probably non-linear, so you have to look at things in a given domain according to the empirically based rules for that domain. Even in chemistry (at least beyond the hydrogen atom, if things are the same as when I was in high school back in the Pleistocene), the reduction to physics is not entirely practical, so chemists develop higher level theories about chemicals rather than lower level "machine language" theories.