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by u1hcw9nx·5mo ago·view on hn ↗
You must consider both time and locality.

From now until protons decay and matter does not exist anymore is only 10^56 nanoseconds.

6 comments
If protons decay. There isn't really any reason to believe they're not stable.
And recent DESI data suggests that dark energy is not constant and the universe will experience a big crunch in a little more than double its current age, for a total lifespan of 33 billion years, no need to get wild with the orders of magnitude on years into the future. The infinite expansion to heat death over 10^100 years is looking less likely, 10^11 years should be plenty.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260215225537.h...

not obvious to me this makes things better as opposed to worse? sure, the time bound helps but in the runup to a crunch won't we get vastly more devices in causal range at an asymptotically increasing rate?
Who’s there doing the counting? I would assume the temperatures at those extremes won’t support life in its known forms.

Perhaps some Adamesque (as in douglas adams) creature whose sole purpose is to collect all unique UUIDs and give them names.

Runup to the crunch is a looong time lots of which is probably very habitable. in 5 billion years life can arise from scratch become conscious and exterminate itself
Protons can decay because the distinction between matter and energy isn't permanent.

Two quarks inside the proton interact via a massive messenger particle. This exchange flips their identity, turning the proton into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion then immediately converts into gamma rays.

Proton decayed!

This destroys a baryon, an operation which is prohibited by the standard model.
Baryon number is an accidental symmetry, not a fundamental one. Unlike charge or color, it is not protected by a gauge principle and is just a consequence of the field content and renormalizability at low energies.

The standard model is almost certainly an effective field theory and a low-energy approximation of a more comprehensive framework. In any ultraviolet completion, such as a GUT, quarks and leptons inhabit the same multiplets. At these scales, the distinction between matter types blurs, and the heavy gauge bosons provide the exact mediation mechanism described to bypass the baryon barrier.

Furthermore, the existence of the universe is an empirical mandate for baryon-violation. If baryon number were a strict, immutable law, the Sakharov conditions could not be met, and the primordial matter-antimatter symmetry would have resulted in a total annihilation. Our existence is proof that baryon number is not conserved. Even within the current framework, non-perturbative effects like sphalerons demonstrate that the Standard Model vacuum itself does not strictly forbid the destruction of baryons.

The sum of the conserved quantities, e.g. chromatic charge, electric charge and spin, is null for the set of 8 particles formed by the 3 u quarks, the 3 d quarks and the electron and the neutrino, i.e. for the components of a proton plus a neutron plus an electron plus a neutrino.

This is the only case of a null sum for these quantities, where no antiparticles are involved. The sum is also null for 2 particles, where one is the antiparticle of the other, allowing their generation or annihilation, and it is also null for the 4 particles that take part in any weak interaction, like the decay of a neutron into a proton, which involves a u quark, a d antiquark, an electron and an antineutrino, and this is what allows the transmutations between elementary particles that cannot happen just through generation and annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs.

Thus generation and annihilation of groups of such 8 particles are not forbidden by the known laws. The Big Bang model is based on equal quantities of these 8 particles at the beginning, which is consistent with their simultaneous generation at the origin.

On the other hand, the annihilation of such a group of 8 particles, which would lead to the disappearance of some matter, appears as an extraordinarily improbable event.

For annihilation, all 8 particles would have to come simultaneously at a distance from each other much smaller than the diameter of an atomic nucleus, inside which quarks move at very high speeds, not much less than the speed of light, so they are never close to each other.

The probability of a proton colliding simultaneously with a neutron, with an electron and with a neutrino, while at the same time the 6 quarks composing the nucleons would also be gathering at the same internal spot seems so low that such an event is extremely unlikely to ever have happened in the entire Universe, since its beginning.

Protons (and mass and energy) could also potentially be created. If this happens, the heat death could be avoided.

Conservation of mass and energy is an empirical observation, there is no theoretical basis for it. We just don't know any process we can implement that violates it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

All of physics is „just“ based on empirical observation. It’s still a pretty good tool for prediction.
Conservation laws result from continuous symmetries in the laws of physics, as proven by Noether's theorem.
Time translation symmetry implies energy conservation, but time translation symmetry is only an empirical observation on a local scale and has not been shown to be true on a global universe scale.
That's such an odd way to use units. Why would you do 10^56 * 10^-9 seconds?
This was my thought. Nanoseconds are an eternity. You want to be using Planck units for your worst-case analysis.
Planck units are a mathematical convenience, not a physical limit. For instance, the Planck mass is on the order of an eyelash or grain of sand.
Planck units are physical limits. The Planck mass is the limit of the mass of an elementary particle before it would form a black hole.
"Plank units are not physical limits on reality itself" is what I should have said. We can obviously have larger or smaller masses.

The plank time is a limit on a measurement process, not the smallest unit of time.

> Plank units are not physical limits on reality itself

We don't actually know that. They might be. Planck units are what happens when GR meets QM and we just don't know yet what happens there.

But as a heuristic, they probably put pretty good bounds on what we can reasonably expect to be technologically achievable before humans go extinct.

Nope. What you say is a myth.

The Planck mass is just the square root of the quotient of dividing the product between the natural units of angular momentum and velocity, by the Newtonian constant of gravitation.

This Planck mass expresses a constant related to the conversion of the Newtonian constant of gravitation from the conventional system of units to a natural system of units, which is why it appears instead of the classic Newtonian constant inside a much more complex expression that computes the Chandrasekhar limit for black holes.

The Planck mass has absolutely no physical meaning (otherwise than expressing in a different system of units a constant equivalent with the Newtonian constant of gravitation), unlike some other true universal constants, like the so-called constant of fine structure (or constant of Sommerfeld), which is the ratio between the speed of an electron revolving around a nucleus of infinite mass in the state with the lowest total energy, and the speed of light (i.e. that electron speed measured in natural units). The constant of fine structure is a measure of the intensity of the electromagnetic interaction, like the Planck mass or the Newtonian constant of gravitation are measures of the intensity of the gravitational interaction.

The so-called "Planck units" have weird values because they are derived from the Newtonian constant of gravitation, which is extremely small. Planck has proposed them in 1899, immediately after computing for the first time what is now called as Planck's constant.

He realized that Planck's constant provides an additional value that would be suitable for a system of natural fundamental units, but his proposal was a complete failure because he did not understand the requirements for a system of fundamental units. He has started from the proposals made by Maxwell a quarter of century before him, but from 2 alternatives proposed by Maxwell for defining a unit of mass, Planck has chosen the bad alternative, of using the Newtonian constant of gravitation.

Any system of fundamental units where the Newtonian constant of gravitation is chosen by convention, instead of being measured, is impossible to use in practice. The reason is that this constant can be measured only with great uncertainties. Saying by law that it has a certain value does not make the uncertainties disappear, but it moves them into the values of almost all other physical quantities. In the Planck system of units, no absolute value is known with a precision good enough for modern technology. The only accurate values are relative, i.e. the ratios between 2 physical quantities of the same kind.

The Planck system of units is only good for showing how a system of fundamental units MUST NOT be defined.

Because the Planck units of length and time happen by chance to be very small, beyond the range of any experiments that have ever been done in the most powerful accelerators, absolutely nobody knows what can happen if a physical system could be that small, so claims that some particle could be that small and it would collapse in a black hole are more ridiculous than claiming to have seen the Monster of Loch Ness.

The Einsteinian theory of gravitation is based on averaging the distribution of matter, so we can be pretty sure that it cannot be valid in the same form at elementary particle level, where you must deal with instantaneous particle positions, not with their mass averaged over a great region of empty space.

It has become possible to use Planck's constant in a system of fundamental units only much later than 1899, i.e. after 1961, when the quantization of magnetic field was measured experimentally. However, next year, in 1962, an even better method was discovered, by the prediction of the Josephson effect. The Josephson effect would have been sufficient to make the standard kilogram unnecessary, but metrology has been further simplified by the discovery of the von Klitzing effect in 1980. Despite the fact that this would have been possible much earlier, only since 2019 the legal system of fundamental units depends on Planck's constant, but in a good way, not in that proposed by Planck.

If you go far beyond nanoseconds, energy becomes a limiting factor. You can only achieve ultra-fast processing if you dedicate vast amounts of matter to heat dissipation and energy generation. Think on a galactic scale: you cannot have even have molecular reaction speeds occurring at femtosecond or attosecond speeds constantly and everywhere without overheating everything.
Maybe. It's not clear whether these are fundamental limits or merely technological ones. Reversible (i.e. infinitely efficient) computing is theoretically possible.
Reversible computing is not infinitely efficient, because irreversible operations, e.g. memory erasing, cannot be completely avoided.

However, the computing efficiency could be greatly increased by employing reversible operations whenever possible and there are chances that this will be done in the future, but the efficiency will remain far from infinite.

If you have a black hole as an infinite heat sink this helps a great deal.
Black holes have a maximum growth rate
By infinite I mean a black hole gets COLDER as you add mass and energy to it.
Nanoseconds is a natural unit for processors operating around a GHz, as it's roughly the time of a clock cycle.

If a CPU takes 4 cycles to generate a UUID and the CPU runs at 4 GHz it churns out one every nanosecond.

I got a big laugh at the “only” part of that. I do have a sincere question about that number though, isn’t time relative? How would we know that number to be true or consistent? My incredibly naive assumption would be that with less matter time moves faster sort of accelerating; so, as matter “evaporates” the process accelerates and converges on that number (or close it)?
Times for things like "age of the universe" are usually given as "cosmic time" for this reason. If it's about a specific object (e.g. "how long until a day on Earth lasts 25 hours") it's usually given in "proper time" for that object. Other observers/reference frames may perceive time differently, but in the normal relativistic sense rather than a "it all needs to wind itself back up to be equal in the end" sense.
The local reference frame (which is what matters for proton decay) doesn't see an outside world moving slower or faster depending on how much mass is around it to any significant degree until you start adding a lot of mass very close around.
If we think of the many worlds interpretation, how many universes will we be making every time we assign a CCUID to something?
> many worlds interpretation

These are only namespaces. Many worlds can have all the same (many) random numbers and they will never conflict with each other!

We don't "make" universes in the MWI. The universal wavefunction evolves to include all reachable quantum states. It's deterministic, because it encompasses all allowed possibilities.
Humpf…

You just had to collapse my wave function here…

That's Copenhagen, not MWI! :P
In that interpretation the total number of worlds does not change.
Proton decay is hypothetical.
So is the need for cosmologically unique IDs. We're having fun.