I like your example of protein folding! (It&#x27;s a frightfully difficulty problem, but nobody expects that understanding it will require us to first understand dark matter and the origin of neutrino mass. Well-understood chemistry by itself is enough to provide the complexity that stymies protein folding computations.)<p>Thinking about your final paragraph, I guess it gets very much at Carroll&#x27;s point. I expect that he&#x27;d claim we wouldn&#x27;t notice any difference at all: if we would, that would directly imply that something beyond the standard model was necessary to understand everyday life. But as he explains, we have every reason to believe we&#x27;ve exhaustively explored the relevant range of energies and interaction strengths. If something about chemistry required physics beyond the standard model, we would almost certainly have noticed by now.