Point taken! I agree that terminology is especially fickle in physics, and it can be very confusing. Words need to be co-opted in order to discuss the objects

Point taken! I agree that terminology is especially fickle in physics, and it can be very confusing. Words need to be co-opted in order to discuss the objects of a new theory, and often they are simply chosen by rough analogy. The "mass" of Newton's spacetime is not the "mass" of Einstein's relativity. The "spin" of an electron is not the same as the spin of a car's wheel. John Stewart Bell has a nice quotation about this when discussing the use of the word "measurement" in quantum theory: > Take for example the “strangeness”, “charm”, and “beauty” of elementary particle physics. No one is taken in by this “baby talk”. ... Would that it were so with “measurement”. But in fact the word has had such a damaging effect on the discussion, that I think it should now be banned altogether in quantum mechanics. As for atomism more broadly, now that I think about it there are some modern theoretical physicists with ideas about the discretisation of spacetime, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2852 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2852