#aside: i did a quick calculation for the acceleration afterwards. it would actually be much more

[quantummindclassicalheart]

One other thing to consider in the "making the atom big" scenario: atoms (e.g. the hydrogen atom) are stable because of quantum effects. Specifically, the fact that electron orbitals (the quantum equivalent of orbits around the nucleus) are discrete, and there is a lowest mathematically allowed energy level, so that the electron doesn't just "fall in" (even when it has zero angular momentum, i.e. it's not going "around" the nucleus).

If you try to make a big atom large enough to fit in a hydraulic press, what you get is macroscopic (person-sized) quantities of charge with well-defined position and momenta, rather than the probability distributions you get at the quantum scale.

Quantum effects no longer apply at the macroscopic scale, so your big electron is now drawn into your big nucleus by the electric interaction. As it accelerates, it releases electromagnetic radiation proportional to the square of the charge according to the Larmor formula.

For concreteness, suppose your electron was scaled up to the size of a ping pong ball. A ping pong ball has a radius about 10^13 times larger than that of an electron, so the charge of your big electron (which scales with volume, not length) would be about (10^13)^3 times the charge of a single electron, or about 10^20 Coulombs.

If the big electron falls in at a modest 1 m/s^2 (one-tenth as fast as the ping pong ball would fall due to gravity alone), it radiates about 10^24 Watts of power. For reference, the global power usage is estimated at 10^12 Watts.

So as it falls in, the big electron releases an amount of radiation a million million times more power than the entire energy usage of the Earth, and about a hundred times less than the power output of the entire sun.

If you really did make a big electron and a big proton, you wouldn't need a hydraulic press to compress it. First, the electric attraction would immediately draw them together, and second, your hydraulic press (and lab, and the planet) would be blasted by an amount of electromagnetic radiation comparable to the power output of the entire Sun.

One of my students emailed me this question in the middle of the night last night:

If you coukd enlarge an atom to be the right size for a hydraulic press, or shrink the hydraulic press to fit the atom, what would happen if you squeezed the single atom with the hydraulic press?

(I also messaged Randall Munroe but I don't think he'll answer me)

So you're essentially asking what happens when you compress an atom. If you force the electrons of an atom inwards towards the atom's nucleus hard enough, the electrons and protons will merge to form neutrons. The atom basically melts, and you get this extremely high energy neutron plasma slurry. That's the stuff that neutron stars are made of.