But we do know why, it's just not simple. The atoms interact with one another because of a variety of fundamental forces, but since there can be hundreds of thousands of atoms in a single protein, it's plainly beyond human comprehension to explain why it folds the way it does, one fundamental force interaction at a time.
Fair. I guess the interesting thing for protein folding research then is that there appears to be a way to approximate/simplify the calculations required to predict folding patterns that doesn’t require the precision of existing folding models and software. In essence, AlphaFold is an existence proof that there should be a way to model protein folding more efficiently.
