In the brilliant series of stories by the space wanderer Iyon Tikhy, there is one dedicated to his genealogy. And there, according to Iyon’s recollections, there was a certain ancestor who tried to split matter by stubbornly beating a hammer on an anvil.

It is probably possible to flatten atoms with strong blows – for example, neutron stars. Someone forged them from neutrons, didn’t they?
However, let’s try to do without hammering for now.
Before Ernst Rutherford’s experiments, physicists had an idea of atoms as some kind of droplets – balls of matter in which negative and positive charges balanced in magnitude floated peacefully. Like a bun with raisins, where the “test” was a positive charge, and the highlights were inclusions: negative electrons.
Rutherford, bombarding these “buns” with fast–flying helium nuclei – Alpha particles, discovered “something strange.” If atoms were “buns”, then massive Alpha particles (two protons and two neutrons), penetrating such soft buns, should deviate from their path rather weakly. Some weakly positive substance (dough-bun pulp) and some negative inclusions in it could not strongly bend the trajectory of a massive, fast-flying particle by the forces of Coulomb attraction-repulsion.
In fact, in experiments, something else turned out. Some alpha particles, FEW, however, were deflected by the target atoms very strongly, and in even rarer cases, alpha particles WERE THROWN BACK! This was not to be expected from the “soft buns”. Analyzing the results of these strange deviations and their statistics, Rutherford came to an original idea: The positive substance of atoms is NOT DISTRIBUTED as a kind of “soft” substance over the volume of the entire atom, but concentrated in its center, in the form of a dense and very small positively charged nucleus. Moreover, it was MUCH SMALLER in size than the atom itself (this explained such a strange fact that there were VERY FEW sharp deviations at a large angle, and very few alpha particles reflected by the atom!) This means that the probability of a head-on collision or a flight of particles close enough to the core is very small! Thus arose the basis of the idea of the “planetary model” of the Rutherford atom, which was immediately criticized by physicists from the standpoint of electrodynamics. After all, if electrons spin like planets around the nucleus, held near it by the forces of Coulomb (electrostatic) attraction, then they must emit electromagnetic waves, which means they lose their kinetic energy and quickly FALL ON the NUCLEUS! And the atoms showed enviable, if not eternal, stability. The planetary model turned out to be stillborn, although experiments confirmed the validity of the idea of a small dense core surrounded by a cloud of electrons. We will not dwell on the many different attempts to explain in some other way the stability of such a configuration (including a model with some floating magnets in which magnetic forces both attracted and repelled magnets. The stability of such a system was very flimsy!)
The solution to the problem was proposed by the young Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who saved the planetary model by refusing to apply the laws of electrodynamics specifically to the atom,
“Let’s say,” Bohr suggested, –that there are some special, “stationary” orbits in the atom, rotating on which electrons DO NOT EMIT!” They don’t radiate and that’s it, although by all rights, they should! This was one of Bohr’s famous Postulates, that is, certain AXIOMS that are accepted (or rather allowed) without proof.
This is NOT a “truth accepted without proof”, but a kind of assumption! The truth is something that has been PROVEN, and the axiom, although it needs proof, but for some reason, it is NOT AVAILABLE to us!  And having accepted this assumption, let’s see what we can get based on it.
This is how Bohr’s Postulates entered physics, which turned out to be very successful and immediately explain a lot!

But what interests us in this drama is something else: What would happen if Rutherford’s critics turned out to be right and the electron, having spent all its kinetic energy on emitting electromagnetic waves, FELL on the nucleus? What would have happened THEN???
Then the positive charge of the nucleus, equal in magnitude to the negative electron, would “destroy” it and we would get a piece of ABSOLUTELY NEUTRAL MATTER.
That’s where the hitch comes in. After all, a charge is energy. And then it turns out that there was the energy of two charged particles and suddenly it disappeared, neutralized.
Contradiction To The Law Of Conservation Of Energy.
So, no matter what happens there, it turns out that an electron CANNOT FALL “merging with it in ecstasy” onto the nucleus! And what can? To settle down somewhere very, very close to it and form some kind of strange connected electron-proton system (let’s take the simplest case of a hydrogen atom, where the nucleus is one proton and there is only one electron in the shell.) They didn’T MERGE, but they didn’t separate either. And this is NOT an ordinary atom with stationary orbits! On the one hand, there are forces of Coulomb attraction of dissimilar charges, on the other, some forces (not centrifugal!!!) they are kept at some very small distance from each other. And these are NOT powerful intra-nuclear forces, 137 times greater than electric ones!
The only candidate for such remote retention are the forces of their MAGNETIC INTERACTION. If a proton and an electron rotate each around their axis (spin, and they are opposite for a proton and an electron), then this immediately generates the presence of a magnetic moment, spin.. And magnetic forces change with distance differently than electric ones, that is, the dependence is cubic, not square. If their magnetic fields are directed in one direction, then it turns out that there is still a system of two magnets “lying” on their side so that their north and south poles are located close to each other and this leads to their mutual repulsion.
Will such a system be sustainable?
It seems to be – yes!
If the charges begin to diverge, then the magnetic repulsion drops SHARPLY, faster than the electrostatic attraction, and the latter returns the particles “to their place”.
If for some reason they begin to come closer, then the magnetic repulsion begins to overcome the electric attraction and they disperse again!
Again, we are not talking about some kind of centrifugal forces holding the electron in an orbit close to the proton!
And what happened to us?
It turned out to be a NEUTRON!
A NEUTRON????
But immediately two new problems are coming at us:
First, the neutron particle outside the nucleus is UNSTABLE and decays on average (statistically average) after 13 minutes into a proton and an electron.
The second is why suddenly the identical magnetic poles of a proton and an electron were located side by side, but the poles of different names did not turn out to be side by side and they pulled together.
To this, last, it can be answered that NATURE DOES NOT ALLOW the DESTRUCTION OF CHARGES, and if they were pulled together, then plus and minus would completely neutralize, destroy each other!
There is some unknown reason for the Law of Nature about the Indestructibility of Charges.
If we add to what has just been said my long-standing hypothesis that our physical three-dimensional protospace is GENERATED by two protospaces: Electric and Magnetic, then charges and poles are some kind of fundamental fundamentals that create our space and therefore they simply cannot disappear in OUR SPACE! Along with their disappearance, our three-dimensional orthogonal physical-geometric space will disappear. Where they disappear, there is no OUR SPACE, and maybe no time. And where it exists, CREATED by THEM, charges and poles cannot disappear by definition.

As for the disintegration, the hypothesis is no less fantastic. There is a certain factor that randomly changes the balance of the forces of attraction and repulsion always in favor of expansion, that is, it weakens the Coulomb approximation forces for a while so that the repelling magnets diverge far enough and the electric forces are no longer able to hold them. What could be such a factor?
Of the really known ones, there is a certain background of electromagnetic radiation, the so–called “relic”. Its wave, passing through this couple lying side by side, weakens the Coulomb attraction with its electric field and causes decay. The density of the waves is such that, on average, a certain “separation wave” passes through a proton-electron pair every thirteen minutes.
Another candidate for the role of a razluchnitsa may be a Temporal Wave, a wave of compressed – stretched passage of time. One part of it, compressed time, enhances magnetic repulsion, and the other – a slow, stretched passage of time – weakens the electric attraction and particles fly apart – neutron decay occurs.
Fantasies…

But we started with the anvil.
“Rise higher, our heavy hammer,
Knock harder on the steel chest, knock, knock!”
Or maybe he’s NOT knocking on the author’s steel chest, but on his copper forehead…?
Well, this probability is not zero either…
2 X 2022