Is it possible that atoms are tiny universes, whose quarks are billions of galaxies...

Possible, but extremely unlikely.
Was popularized in the 1920s. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Who_Shrank

The actual story can be read at prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article874

The obvious problem is the implication that there are no "elementary" particles. The universe continues to show ever-increasing detail, like the Mandelbrot Set, when examined more closely.

I can think of at least two stories which go in the "opposite" direction (enlarging the hero into the next level "up") and two more in which (though some topological anomaly) the scale is "circular" -- both shrinking and expanding bring you back into our "own" cosmos.

The image is from a story in which the writer got Relativity completely backwards. Objects approaching the speed of light GREW (in all 3 dimensions) rather than shrank. The protagonist bursts through into a macroverse.

And, of course, there's "Men in Black".

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A finite universe is far more scary than an infinite one.

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Yep. I imagine them to be a lot quicker than ours as well. Like, our 13.7 billion years is like a Plancktime for someone in the universe above

>Possible, but extremely unlikely
Nah, sorry, its not possible at all.

yes it is.

Nether is scary at all. Since you will almost surely never rise higher above the surface of this one tiny planet t5han a jet airliner can take you, it literally has no impact on you at all.

No it isn't.

I hate to say "impossible" unless something violates one of the conservation laws/symmetries.
To me, "extremely unlikely" is something on the order of the soot and fragments of the burned Library of Alexandria "just happening" to come together to re-create the original Library after all these millennia.
It COULD happen. No law prevents it.
I wouldn't even know how to begin calculating its improbability. Douglas Adams might.

>And, of course, there's "Men in Black".

And...

In the 1970 TV animated version, at the end, the Whos encounter a dust-speck on THEIR scale, that is also inhabited,

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>Douglas Adams might.

I'd hate to dig him up just for that...

>hits blunt
yeah dude

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.
And the great fleas, themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Assuming they obey our laws of physics, they would presumably either rip themselves apart due to electric force (a quark is basically a singularity, a point charge so has an unimaginably strong field around it) or crush themselves due to the strong force (which only acts over tiny distances, but when it does is very strong). Maybe the strong force would be the atom's version of gravity, holding it all together, preventing loss of energy...
Also, photons would basically diffract around everything, so the only ones that would behave like our photons would be gamma.
Gravity would have 0 effect at these pathetic masses.

Highly unlikely IMO. If there were, they would hardly be recognizable.

>if there were life forms on these atoms, wouldn't there be a humanitarian crisis at CERN?

Fucking aspies...