Are thoughts more fundamental to our reality than particles? “Well, how can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?” Dorothy asked the scarecrow. And after a moment’s glance toward the sky, he replied honestly, “I don’t know.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, an influential mathematician and philosopher, whose work spanned the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, argued methodically that the building blocks of reality are actually dimensionless units that have more the character of a mathematical point than an elementary particle. Leibniz imagined a universe of matter built up from non-material substances. These fundamental substances resemble thoughts more than the atomic building blocks of matter conceived in 19th century physics. While modern quantum conceptions have shattered the character of these tiny material elements, they continue to influence the popular understanding of fundamental particles such as the recently discovered Higgs boson.
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