Matter fell from grace during the twentieth century. It became mortal.
Very soon after that it was murdered, exploded at its core, torn to shreds, blown to smithereens. The smallest of smallest bits, the heart of the atom, was broken apart with a violence that made the earth and the gods quake. In an instant, in a flash of light brighter than a thousand suns, the distance between Heaven and Earth was obliterated – not merely imaginatively crossed by Newton’s natural theophilosophy, but physically crossed out by a mushroom cloud reaching into the stratosphere. ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’.
Karen Barad in ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable’, p. 64.