The Idea of Fundamental Building Blocks

Physics often casts itself as a search for the ultimate Lego bricks of reality: indivisible particles, strings, or quanta out of which everything else is constructed. The metaphor of “building blocks” suggests solidity, discreteness, and a bottom layer beneath all others. Yet every time physics thinks it has found the final bricks, those bricks dissolve — atoms into protons and neutrons, protons into quarks, quarks into fields, fields into… what next? The metaphor drives a fruitless archaeology of reality, always digging deeper for a foundation that recedes with every discovery.

Relational ontology takes another path: what is fundamental is not a block but a relation, not a particle but a potential for interaction. There is no bedrock of indivisible things; there is only patterned connectivity. To speak of “building blocks” is to import the wrong image: of masonry stacked into walls, rather than a web of tensions, alignments, and reflexive actualisations. The world is not built; it is woven. And this shift from bricks to bonds reveals why the search for a bottom fails: reality does not sit on a foundation — it hangs together through relation.