The Order of Time

6 THE WORLD IS MADE OF EVENTS, NOT THINGS

O gentlemen, the time of life is short . . .

And if we live, we live to tread on kings.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (act 5, scene 2)

When Robespierre freed France from monarchy, Europe’s ancien régime feared that the end of civilization itself was nigh. When the young seek to liberate themselves from an old order of things, the old are afraid that all will founder. But Europe was able to survive perfectly well, even without the king of France. The world will go on turning, even without King Time.

There is, nevertheless, an aspect of time that has survived the demolition inflicted on it by nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics. Divested of the trappings with which Newtonian theory had draped it, and to which we had become so accustomed, it now shines out with greater clarity: the world is nothing but change.

None of the pieces that time has lost (singularity, direction, independence, the present, continuity) puts into question the fact that the world is a network of events. On the one hand, there was time, with its many determinations; on the other, the simple fact that nothing is: things happen.

The absence of the quantity “time” in the fundamental equations does not imply a world that is frozen and immobile. On the contrary, it implies a world in which change is ubiquitous, without being ordered by Father Time; without innumerable events being necessarily distributed in good order, or along the single Newtonian time line, or according to Einstein’s elegant geometry. The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.

They are events, indeed: change, happening. This happening is diffuse, scattered, disorderly. But it is happening; it is not stasis. Clocks that run at different speeds do not mark a single time, but the hands on each clock change in relation to the others. The fundamental equations do not include a time variable, but they do include variables that change in relation to each other. Time, as Aristotle suggested, is the measure of change; different variables can be chosen to measure that change, and none of these has all the characteristics of time as we experience it. But this does not alter the fact that the world is in a ceaseless process of change.

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 in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. They are—if they are at all—in a where but also in a when. They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events.

On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.

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, as we have discovered, are nothing other than the ephemeral agitations of a field? The quantum fields, which we have found to be little more than codes of a language with which to speak of interactions and events? We cannot think of the physical world as if it were made of things, of entities. It simply doesn’t work.

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. A few examples: 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 the wind 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, feelings. And a human being? Of course it’s not a thing; like the cloud above the mountain, it’s a complex process, where food, information, light, words, and so on enter and exit. . . . A knot of knots in a network of social relations, in a network of chemical processes, in a network of emotions exchanged with its own kind.

For a long time, we have tried to understand the world in terms of some primary substance. Perhaps physics, more than any other discipline, has pursued this primary substance. But the more we have studied it, the less the world seems comprehensible in terms of something that is. It seems to be a lot more intelligible in terms of relations between events.

The words of Anaximander quoted in the first chapter of this book invited us to think of the world “according to the order of time.” If we do not assume a priori that we know what the order of time is—if we do not, that is, presuppose that it is the linear and universal order that we are accustomed to—Anaximander’s exhortation remains valid: we understand the world by studying change, not by studying things.

Those who have neglected this good advice have paid a heavy price for it. Two of the greats who fell into this error were Plato and Kepler, both curiously seduced by the same mathematics.

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

And he attempts to advance the audacious hypothesis that these are the actual shapes of the atoms of the five elementary substances that in antiquity were thought to form everything: earth, water, air, fire, and the quintessence of which the heavens are made. A beautiful idea. But completely mistaken. The error lies in seeking to understand the world in terms of things rather than events. It lies in ignoring change. The physics and astronomy that will work, from Ptolemy to Galileo, from Newton to Schrödinger, will be mathematical descriptions of precisely how things change, not of how they are. They will be about events, not things. The shapes of atoms will be eventually understood only with solutions to Schrödinger’s equations describing how the electrons in atoms move. Events again, not things.

Centuries later, before reaching the momentous results obtained in his maturity, the young Kepler falls into the same error. He asks himself what determines the size of the orbits of planets and allows himself to be seduced by the same theorem that had bewitched Plato (it’s a beautiful one, no doubt about that). Kepler assumes that the regular polyhedra determine the size of the orbits of the planets: if they are placed one inside the other with spheres between them, the radii of these spheres will be in the same proportion as the radii of the planets.

A nice idea, but completely wrongheaded. Once again, it lacks dynamics. When Kepler moves on, later in life, to tackle the question of how planets move, the gates of the heavens open.

We therefore describe the world as it happens, not as it is. 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 (a little, not much) by studying how we interact with each other, how we think. . . . We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.

“Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous.⁵⁸

But only before returning to dust. Because sooner or later, obviously, everything returns to dust.

The absence of time does not mean, therefore, that everything is frozen and unmoving. It means that the incessant happening that wearies the world is not ordered along a time line, is not measured by a gigantic ticktocking. It does not even form a four-dimensional geometry. It is a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events. The world is more like Naples than Singapore.

If by “time” we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time.