It makes a lot of sense to suppose that
the world is made of tiny indivisible particles, because from
that foundation one can imagine that the whole familiar
physical world has been literally put together like simple
Lego (c.f.
Toric Lego!:). This materialistic world view can be
traced back to the ancient Greeks with Democritus around the
5th century BC and the ancient Indians with Kanada around the
6th century BC. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was clearly
sympathetic to an atomic philosophy even though he was a
profoundly religious man and today most scientists accept this
atomistic world view.
But the 20th century has seen a massive
departure from traditional
metaphysics - from Boolean logic and common
sense ontology and simple cognitive epistemology - even from
static empty flat Euclidean 3D geometry and absolute uniform
linear time. 21st century mathematical metaphysics,
unconstrained by any observational evidence indicating
quantitative incorrectness of the
standard model of particle physics, has opened the door
widely to much imaginative
theoretical speculation, the only constraint being
consistency with the low energy effective theory.