I like your example of protein folding! (It's a frightfully difficulty problem, but nobody expects that understanding it will require us to first understand dar

I like your example of protein folding! (It'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.) Thinking about your final paragraph, I guess it gets very much at Carroll's point. I expect that he'd claim we wouldn'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'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.