See the article, Physicists find that an ultrahigh-energy proton looks like a black disk, for what I’d consider a preliminary but interesting analysis of what happens when protons are energized to an extremely high-level, higher than we can conceive of reaching with current technology.
There are a few questions it raises in my half-educated mind — not criticisms directed against the work but rather questions of the sort I should keep in mind as I continue studying modern science, including general relativity and quantum theory. I’ll keep most of those questions to myself and only note that the work either indicates or (perhaps implicitly) assumes — I don’t know enough to be sure of the situation — that gluons become more important than quarks at those extremely high levels of energy.
In an over-simplistic way, I can say that quarks are stuff and gluons carriers of relationships, as you might guess from the name ‘glu(e)on’. Stuff melts away and entities remain which are mediators of relationships. I think we’re seeing hints of what might be called ‘pure energy’ or even ‘soul-stuff’ by the spiritually inclined.
Several times over the past few years, I’ve suggested the half-serious aphorism: Matter is frozen soul-stuff. The point is the abstractness and lack of particularity in the stuff from which the concrete thing-like being of our world is shaped. In any case, I’ve yet seen no reason to back off that claim and would endorse the underlying idea with few qualifications if the language were cleaner, that is, if we could purge our dualistic language — found even in the most empirical of thinkers — which posits a realm of mind-truth-mathematics which is separate from the realm of concrete being. In this dualistic way of thinking, mystics have souls which aren’t really part of this mundane reality but so do physicists have minds which can know and judge this realm of mere gluons and quarks and who knows what else. I’ve often argued or at least claimed that relationships are primary over stuff — see Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality: for an early version of my claim. This is tied to another claim that created being is a spectrum ranging from the extremely abstract form of the raw stuff of Creation, truths manifested by God, to the concrete form of thing-like being.
At this point, the language is much of the problem in moving on to a richer and more complex and truer understanding of the world as God created it and continues to create it, as it presents itself to our minds and senses.