Quotes About Events

An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.

Things" in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous

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.

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 world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr's quantum leaps, against Heisenberg's world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.

This means we can say that on Mars there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter-of-an-hour of events during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future.

In technical terms, we say that Einstein has understood that "absolute simultaneity" does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist "now.

The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.

If LISA is launched, it should be able to see not only the gravitational waves produced by stars and black holes but also the diffuse background of primordial gravitational waves generated at a time close to the Big Bang. These waves should tell us about the quantum bounce. In the subtle irregularities of space, we should be able to find traces of events that took place fourteen billion years ago, at the origin of our universe, and confirm our deductions on the nature of space and time.

We are processes, events, composite and limited in space and time. But if we are not an individual entity, what is it that founds our identity and its unity?

The key fact that Einstein understood is that this quarter of an hour is inevitable: there is no way of reducing it. It is woven into the texture of the events of space and of time: we cannot abbreviate it, any more than we can send a letter to the past.

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.

The passing of time is intrinsic to the world; it is born of the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events that are the world, and that themselves generate their own time.

There is our past: all the events that happened before what we can witness now. There is our future: the events that will happen after the moment from which we can see the here and now. Between this past and this future there is an interval that is neither past nor future and still has a duration: fifteen minutes on Mars; eight years on Proxima b; millions of years in the Andromeda galaxy. It is the expanded present.28 It is perhaps the greatest and strangest of Einstein's discoveries.

The passage of time is internal to the world, is born in the world itself in the relationship between quantum events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time. The

T]he elementary form of the mechanics of the world...does not need to mention 'time.' The world without a time variable is not a complicated one. It's a net of interconnected events, where the variables in play adhere to probabilistic rules that, incredibly, we know for a good part how to write. And it's a clear world, windswept and full of beauty as the crests of mountains; aridly beautiful as the cracked lips of the adolescent you loved.

In the elementary equations of the world,13 the arrow of time appears only where there is heat.* The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved. In every sequence of events that becomes absurd if projected backward, there is something that is heating up.

Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it.

Our intuitive idea of the present, the ensemble of all events happening "now" in the universe, is an effect of our blindness: our inability to recognize small temporal intervals. An illegitimate extrapolation from our parochial experience.

The world described by the theory is thus further distanced from the one with which we are familiar. There is no longer space that "contains" the world, and there is no longer time "in which" events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with one another.

The expanded present is the set of events that are neither past nor future: it exists, just as there are human beings who are neither our descendants nor our forebears.

But on the moon, the duration of the "extended present" is a few seconds, and on Mars it is a quarter of an hour. This means we can say that on Mars there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter-of-an-hour of events during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future.

Non c'è più lo spazio che «contiene» il mondo e non c'è più il tempo «lungo il quale» avvengono gli eventi. Ci sono solo processi elementari dove quanti di spazio e materia interagiscono tra loro in continuazione. L'illusione dello spazio e del tempo continui attorno a noi è la visione sfocata di questo fitto pullulare di processi elementari.