A newly proposed cosmic speed limit may constrain how fast anything in the universe can grow. Its existence follows from Alan Turing’s pioneering work on theoretical computer science, which opens the intriguing possibility that the structure of the universe is fundamentally linked to the nature of computation.

Cosmic limits aren’t a new idea. While studying the relationship between space and time, Albert Einstein showed that nothing in the universe can exceed the speed of light, as part of his special theory of relativity. Now, Toby Ord at the University of Oxford is proposing a new physical limit based on computation.

“I had the seed of this idea more than 20 years ago,” he says. “It would apply to any quantity you can directly measure, including mass, charge, energy, etc., and even more subtle things like the time intervals between a sequence of events.” . . .