I've heard this in many placed, though I'm not sure where it originally came from (not necessarily bad astronomy, just hypothesis):

I've heard it cited in movies, books, and in comic stand-up: "what if our universe is just an atom in the cell of a body of some other man in another universe - and what if we hold infinitely many universes in our bodies..." Yeah one could go on for whatever effect they want; I've heard a lot of permutations. Does this have a proper name?

A mistake based on thinking that the earliest description people are taught about atoms is the whole truth rather than an extremely simplified introduction to the subject?

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

It is called the "Plutonium Atom Totality" theory. Coined by a notable, and prolific Usenet character, Archimedes Plutonium (born Ludwig Poehlmann in 1950, raised as Ludwig Hansen, legally changed his name to Ludwig van Ludvig, then Ludwig Plutonium, then later changed it to Archimedes Plutonium).

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smile, and the Universe smiles with you

Minor Correction

The original concept was based loosely on 'Multivesre' hypothesis and then translated into popular culture as the "Infinite Multiverse" story by the comic book "Atom" which dates back to the 1940's before Ludwig Poehlmann was even born.

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There is no problem that cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives - US Army Demolitions School

I just saw Hayley's comet, she waved, Said "why you always running in place? Even the man in the moon disappeared, Somewhere in the stratosphere" - Shinedown

http://worldsofothersuns.home.comcast.net/

"He Who Shrank" by Henry Hasse was published in Amazing Stories in 1936. It's an old idea.

Edit to add: The solar-system-like atom model is the Bohr model of the atom, dating to 1913. I don't know who came up with the idea of extending it to the point of making atoms into actual solar systems, and vice-versa.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

So, with nine planets since 1930, our solar system was a Fluorine super-atom. With the demotion of Pluto, it's just Oxygen.

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Later . . .

Billy Connolly explains that hypothesis quite eloquently here.
Note, his language not really safe for work, though it'll probably cause people to stop working to laugh, rather than get offended.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Couldn't it be ionised fluorine?

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Cricket is boring. IMHO, of course.

Positively ionized fluorine is not terribly stable.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Which the Mayans knew and is why the world will end on 12/21/12.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Nah, because then it'd be an ion rather than an atom.

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Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
-- Richard Feynman

This is going to end up in Fun-n-Games

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smile, and the Universe smiles with you

The Fluorine cation is unstable, but the anion is okay. Or is that an onion, I forget?

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Later . . .

So, we NEED Pluto back?

I don't know why you revived this, but it gives me an opportunity to add
"The Diamond Lens" (in Atlantic Monthly, 1858) by Fitz-James O'Brien,
and "The Girl in the Golden Atom" (1919) by Ray Cummings.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Then again the number of atoms in the human body is so large that there must be life on one of them.

(Avogadro's number is somewhat bigger than the estimated number of stars in the observable universe, and we know that there must be life out there somewhere amongst all those stars. Don't we?)

Hrrumph...

It's... turtles.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Ah, but the turtles are all the same size.

It's more like the flea hypothesis:

"Great 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"

--Augustus De Morgan

Wasn't there some ancient Greek philosopher who talked about atoms being small worlds, right after they came up with the idea of the atom?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Dr. Suess?

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

Or Seuss, even?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I prefer the following take on the subject:

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.