What would happen if we could zoom in with a microscope infinitely? Would we keep seeing more detail or is there a ‘cut off’ where we can’t see any more detail?
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The short answer is that we don’t know. But when we first became aware of atoms we could tell there was structure because we could see different atoms behaving slightly different. Like you could put a beam through a magnet and there is a distribution of trajectories coming out. So we could tell there was stuff in there. Like electrons and a nucleus. But when you look at electrons we don’t see that kind of structure. Electrons have spin and the direction of it can vary but not the amount. If there was an internal structure that could be arranged in different ways you might imagine that the spin would vary. Also, if there was structure there would energy levels and that would appear as different masses for the electron. We don’t see any evidence of that so if there is structure of some kind it only appears to have one configuration that we can access. The nucleus we know has structure. It is made of quarks and gluons. Quarks are always in composite particles. Never alone. I personally don’t know of evidence for or against structure in a quark but my understanding is the gluons constantly being exchanged make studying quarks very messy. But as I understand it predictions of the standard model have been very precise without requiring any structure in a quark.
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