TUMLA has provided a full account of model development, starting with an incomplete template slowly refined through iterative methods such as sensitivity analysis, as well as different criteria allowing to embed this account in the adequacy-for-purpose view of model evaluation. Model evaluation has been a hot topic of debate during the last two decades. But tackling the issue of models that are not mature enough to be compared to observations; as well as that of their evaluation -how to decide whether model is becoming more accurate when it is not clear what "accurate" means ?- had yet to be done. We are hoping that the account provided will help to promote exploratory tools, especially to funding agencies usually privileging the predictive perspective, and to better communicate how science works in context of high uncertainties to a broad audience.
As mentioned above, the most pressing challenge today for the field is how to choose the systems of astrophysical interest upon which theoreticians should focus, given the current lack of theoretical data compared to observational needs. A. Godard-Palluet and myself have conceived an innovative "Snap Hook" method to address this challenge, that permits to indirectly validate and evaluate the accuracy of computational calculations even in the absence of experimental or observational data. The goal of the paper "Navigating in the dark", accepted for publication in Philosophy of Science, is to give to this method, that seems to be implicitly relied upon in astrochemistry, a proper formulation, in order for philosophers of science to enter the debate, and to highlight its undeniable potential in terms of interdisciplinary facilitation and knowledge transmission.
Dr. B. Desrousseaux, A. Godard-Palluet and myself have also worked on building exploratory tools allowing to test the sensitivity of astrophysical conditions to collisional rate coefficients for a given system, in order to decide whether this sensitivity justifies the computational time and cost involved. The idea consists in applying a random perturbation either to a low-accuracy set of collisional rate coefficients when available, or to those of an isotopologue, to test how astrophysical conditions responds to this change. A first version of the interface VARADEX has been presented during the 2023 workshop in Corsica, but has not yet be made public.
