Another theory of reality is “Leibniz’s fearful doctrine of monads,” as Schrödinger put it. The theory is impossible to disprove but strangely useless. Gottfried Leibniz was a seventeenth-century mathematician who conceived of a world made up of irreducible particles called monads that, taken to their logical conclusion, meant that each person passes their life alone in a self-referential universe of one.
