Seeing further: the story of science & the Royal Society — 4 NEAL STEPHENSON

1. 1. Leibniz's metaphysics, as developed in his Monadology, posits that the fundamental units of the universe are non-spatiotemporal mind-atoms called monads, which perceive all other monads and change state according to an intrinsic rule.
2. 2. Newton and Leibniz's debate, often reduced to a squabble over calculus, was fundamentally about metaphysics: Newton believed in absolute space and time, while Leibniz saw them as emergent from monadic activity.
3. 3. Leibniz's monadology presaged modern concepts like cellular automata, digital physics, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
4. 4. After Leibniz's death, his metaphysics was largely dismissed until Bertrand Russell revived interest around 1900, and later figures like Gödel and Husserl engaged with it seriously.
5. 5. Leibniz's concept of pre-established harmony finds a modern analogue in action principles and state-space theory in physics, which describe systems globally without requiring detailed causal interactions.
6. 6. Loop quantum gravity, an alternative to string theory, is a background-independent theory that treats space and time as emergent, aligning with Leibniz's relational view.
7. 7. Gödel devoted much of his later career to developing a rigorous metaphysical system based on Leibniz, using Husserl's phenomenology to overcome Kant's objections.
8. 8. Eugene Wigner's 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' would have seemed perfectly reasonable to Leibniz, who believed in the inherent rationality of creation.