You Are An Event, Not a Solid
If I have one regret in life, it is that I did not understand how fascinating physics proved to be until I was out of college, but it hasn’t deterred me from continuing to study it. I feel an immense sense of gratitude that I have stuck with it when I read the ideas described in the sixth chapter of Carlo Rovelli The Order of Time:
The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.
We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time. The destruction of the notion of time in fundamental physics is the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives, not of the second. It is the realization of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time.
Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. It is the only way that is compatible with relativity. The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
The difference between things and events is that things persist…
