The world is made of events, not things

not of being, but of becoming.

For a long time, we have tried to understand the world in terms of some primary substance. But the more we have studied it, the less the world seems comprehensible in terms of something that “is”.

In Timaeus, Plato has an excellent idea of attempting to translate into mathematics the physics insights gained by atomists such as Democritus. But he goes in the wrong way: he tries to write the mathematics of the shape of the atoms, rather than the mathematics of their movements. He allows himself to be fascinated by a mathematical theorem that establishes that there are five, and only five, regular polyhedra, these ones:

source: https://mathimages.swarthmore.edu

And he attempts to advance the audacious hypothesis that these are the actual shape of the atoms of the five elementary substances that in antiquity were thought to form everything: earth, fire, water, air, and the quintessence of which the heavens are made.

A beautiful idea, but completely wrongheaded. It lacks dynamics. The phycis and astronomy that will work, from Ptolemy to Galileo, from Newton to Schrodinger, will be mathematical descriptions of precisely how things change, not of how they are. Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are. We understand biology by studying how living beings evolve and live. We understand psychology by studying how we interact with each other, how we think…

The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. If the world were, however, made of things, what would these things be? The atoms, which we have discovered to be made up in turn of smaller particles? The elementary particles, which are nothing other than the ephemeral agitations of a field? The quantum fields, which we have found to speak of interactions and events?

What works instead is thinking about the world as a network of events, simple events, and more complex events that can be disassembled into combinations of simpler ones. For example, a war is not a thing, it’s a sequence of events. A storm is not a thing, it’s a collection of occurrences. A cloud above a mountain is not a thing, it is the condensation of humidity in the air that blows over the mountain. A wave is not a thing, it is a movement of water, and the water that forms it is always different. A family is not a thing, it is a collection of relations, occurrences, and feelings. And a human being? It is not a thing either. It’s s complicated process where food, information, lights, words, and so enter and exit... A knot of knots in a network of social relations, in a network of chemical processes, in a network of emotions changed with its own kind. (There are regularities in quantities and properties that we see continuously changing. And the fundamental theory of the world is constructed to tell us how things vary with respect to each other. There are only events and relations.)

We understand the world by studying changes, not by studying things. Nothing is fixed, and nothing will last. Things in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous. Sooner or later, everything returns to dust. But while we still exist, we should think of ourselves not as a being, but as becoming.

Resources:

1. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1951.

2. Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, 2017