> Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.[1]
I think you could very easily give a cap that hinges on our current understanding of basic physical limitations, and it would arrive surprisingly soon.
That's the thing about Moore's law - it has assumed from the beginning that our 'current understanding of basic physical limitations' is incomplete, and been proven correct on that front many times over.
As I understand it Moore's Law doesn't address any sort of fundamental physical limitations other than perhaps an absolutely limit in terms of some fundamental limit on the smallness of an object, it's just an observation of the doubling of transistor density over a consistent period of time.
It seems more like an economical or social observation than a physical one to me.
I was using OP's terminology, pointing out that people (including Moore himself) have been warning of an imminent cap on Moore's law since at least 1975. Getting into fine detail of what constitutes a 'fundamental physical limit' as opposed to an engineering challenge wasn't really the point, though I personally believe that our understanding of physical limits will develop further.
We don't know what we don't know - there's always the potential of radical technology coming from an upending of things which were 'established' for decades or centuries previously; that's just the nature of science.
Our understanding of basic physical limits seems reasonably good and hasn't changed for a couple of generations. Our understanding of engineering limitations on the other hand is not so good and subject to frequent change.
In contexts like these, “universe” means the observable universe, which is finite in size. Also, creating universes (in the usual models) conserves energy, so you don’t actually gain anything by that.
> In contexts like these, “universe” means the observable universe, which is finite in size. Also, creating universes (in the usual models) conserves energy, so you don’t actually gain anything by that.
"In the usual models" - that's the whole point. For the entire 60 year history of Moore's Law, the "usual models" have stated that it would come to an end in about ten years.
Ultimately, there's a cap. For as far as I know, the universe is finite.