The problem is that what happens particular physical and chemical systems depend very much on the kinds of conditions under which they are tested. What minerals, elements, metals, salts are present, in what concentrations are they each? Do they persist or fluctuate? Do they cycle up and down? In what structure are they, tiny powdered grains, large uniform solids, what is the total surface area, the topology? What are the temperatures like, for how long do they persist? Is there convection, thermophoresis, evaporation? Is there UV light, which wavelengths, what intensity? Are conditions neutral, acidic, alkaline? Reductive, oxidative? There is so incredibly much we still don’t know, and the interactions of very complex, multicomponent systems are almost impossible to predict from first principles.
The number of possible options here is difficult to overstate, and so few have been experimentally tested. This is why claims that “experiment X didn’t produce hypothesized result Y - therefore we know it can’t or won’t” are so silly. I repeat my earlier analogy, you can’t conclude that a particular small rock doesn’t exist on the african continent if you’ve only searched a square meter of it.
This is one of many issues with James Tour’s claim that chemistry has shown there’s some problem with the origin of life. He just can’t conclude that from so limited data. Of course it gets even worse when we consider that Tour treats the origin of life as the origin of something like a modern bacterium.
But we don’t know what the simplest or most likely form of life is, so going back to the analogy, we’re now looking for a rock we don’t know what looks like on the african continent, we’re far from sure just how small it is, and we’ve only looked on one square meter of it.
