Atomism

Atomism is an idea with a long tradition in philosophy, but which is rarely addressed or even alluded to in the poetic world. It is also an idea with a peculiar historical fate—after centuries of being intermittently at the forefront of political and philosophical discourse, atomism has now been almost completely forgotten, not because it has been dismissed or replaced by better ideas, but because it has been so entirely proven to be true.

The proposal that the universe is made up of invisible and indivisible particles was first proposed more than 2500 years ago by the Greek philosopher Leucippus. Many philosophical principals followed from this proposal, including; that only atoms and the void have any reality and everything else is an illusion; that human perception (of the shapes created by atoms) constitutes our reality; that the universe is governed by the true randomness of the...