That’s because “speedup” is a hard thing to measure of the variance of what you’re trying to measure is more than the accuracy you’re trying to achieve. The comparison doesn’t make sense here: physicists are trying to measure a constant while execution time depends on the input data, system load, etc.

But you can measure how many bytes are free on a 10 GB disk.

So long you don't care about performance. Sure, "free space" sounds like a simple concept, but the simple version isn't terribly useful.

Interestingly enough, even the physical constants are all over the map in terms of their experimental uncertainty. The gravitational constant is only good to around 5 digits.

https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?bg

Science in CS is an abused term.

No, computer science is not the same thing as software development. There is a lot of science in computer science, you probably just haven't been exposed to it.

I think there is a lot of math in computer science and not as much science.

Math and logic may be called "formal sciences" as opposed to "natural sciences".

Benchmarking programs is runnimg an empirical experiment. There is a lot of science in computer science.

The systems we built are a lot more complicated than one proton.

A proton is just a location in a vast sea of proton-field

All of which behaves in precisely the same manner.

Also, that's a composite field. I'm not sure talking about it here won't be confusing to people. :p

Which means the proton is more complicated than the OP indicates.