[extropy-chat] HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 12:12:30PM -0500, John K Clark wrote:
> 1) There must be a physical mechanism to compute how proteins fold up since
> the same protein always turns into the same shape and does it in just a few
> seconds, but our most powerful supercomputers would take centuries to figure
> out even the simplest one. What is that computational mechanism?

There's no new physics involved. It's a question of how to write code for a
big machine -- depending in whether it's clever or dumb code that machine
might or might not yet exist. Of course, no currently used forcefield is even
approximately up to the task.
 
> 9) Why is there something rather than nothing?

If there are an infinite or seminfinite numbers of somethings, several kinds
of nothings included, and only one of them did contain you, you still would be asking
this question. If seen that way, that question becomes a lot less magical.

Of course, one still has no idea about that something which makes above
framework possible. That question might well be unknowable.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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