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As comrades know, I forward links to articles about black holes, particle physics, quantum theory, big bang, etc. even if they have no direct relationship to Marxism and are often difficult to wrap your head around.
In the March 2018 Harpers, there's an article by physicist Alan Lightman titled "The Infinity of the Small" that is just tremendous. Lightman is also a novelist and able as such to bridge the two cultures that CP Snow referred to.
It is behind a paywall but don't hesitate to contact me for a copy. This will give you a sense of his approach:
Regardless of whether space is indeed grainy at very small scales, physicists are confident that time and space must be chaotic at Planck. Because of the indeterminate, probabilistic character of quantum physics, at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment. Indeed, at the Planck scale, time itself randomly speeds up and slows down, perhaps even going backward as well as forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us. The sensation of smoothness and substantiality that we experience in our large world of houses and trees results only from averaging out this extreme lumpiness and chaos at the Planck length, in the same way that the graininess of a beach disappears when seen from a thousand feet up.
Thus, if we relentlessly divide space into smaller and smaller pieces, as did Zeno, searching for the smallest element of reality, we arrive at the phantasmagoric world of Planck — where space no longer has meaning. Instead of answering the question of what is the smallest unit of matter, we have invalidated the words used to ask the question. Perhaps that is the way of all ultimate reality, if such a thing exists. As we get closer, we lose the vocabulary. Sitting at midnight on my wooden dock by the sea and imagining myself falling and falling into smaller rooms of reality, I might continue to fall without limit. But once I reach Planck, space as I know it no longer exists. Space has been blown thin by an ancient glassblower, so thin that it dissolves into nothingness. The Planck world is a ghost world. Perhaps that is where we must look for the Absolutes, even if we no longer have the words to describe them.
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