Contemplating the End of Physics
“ Nature’s agonizingly slow process of discovery, driven by cosmological and biological evolution on time scales of millions and billions of years, is accelerated to breakneck speeds in the laboratory.”<p>The slow process is not quite true.<p>For example, humans have about a half a million polypeptide machines (proteins, etc.) that make up the human body.<p>They are made of 20 amino acids in sequence and can be 10s to 100000s units in length.<p>If you calculate amount of polypeptides ribosomes could make given the base 4 DNA string and the choice of 20 amino acids, you will find there are not enough planck voxels in the observable universe to digitally represent them. I.e. the fact that nature found 500k to use for humans to be constructed in only a handful of billion years is profound.<p>It would have made more sense had the universe just been existing forever with no beginning.