If the "something" never exploits a particular law, then in principle you could simulate it if you knew all the laws that actually applied (imagine a hypothetical biological organism that never exploited or experienced quantum entanglement).
But strictly speaking, as we understand it, it's not possible to replicate something exactly without recapitulating the exact laws and running a deterministic simulation, which is not practical.
I don't think anybody is really attempting to exactly replicate things, but rather to create a physical model which can be calcualted and contains enough similarity or transferrability to be able to make accurate generalized predictions about the behavior of the simulated system. How and why that works with modern math methods is still somewhat mysterious. The most useful thing written about that so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
But strictly speaking, as we understand it, it's not possible to replicate something exactly without recapitulating the exact laws and running a deterministic simulation, which is not practical.
I don't think anybody is really attempting to exactly replicate things, but rather to create a physical model which can be calcualted and contains enough similarity or transferrability to be able to make accurate generalized predictions about the behavior of the simulated system. How and why that works with modern math methods is still somewhat mysterious. The most useful thing written about that so far is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...