Tommaso Dorigo’s comrade Vladimir Lenin believed that an electron was a galaxy with many electrons, and so on, indefinitely. That’s what he meant by the statement that matter was “inexhaustible”. This hierarchical picture of the Matryoshka Universe was clearly indefensible already during Lenin’s life. First, it has to stop at the Planck scale because distances shorter than the Planck scale are unphysical, or at least don’t follow the normal laws of geometry. Second, two electrons must be exactly identical to allow chemistry to work, so they can’t carry any substructure that would be as variable as one of a galaxy (or even a high entropy, which must be zero).

— Composite vs elementary particles

— Lubos Motl

2013.02.27 Wednesday ACHK