Events as Atoms

One of the boldest moves in one Nature article (here) is the suggestion — following Sorkin — that events might be “atomic,” indivisible building blocks of reality. On this view, every event comprises a finite number of smallest, irreducible events, like Lego bricks from which the cosmos is assembled.

The metaphor of atomic events rests on an alluring symmetry: just as matter once dissolved into indivisible particles, so too might the fabric of experience dissolve into indivisible happenings. Yet this is another case of reification. It takes a symbolic operation — the cutting of experience into bounded phenomena — and projects it onto reality as if those cuts pre-existed our construal.

Relationally, an “event” is not a unit of substance but the outcome of a symbolic cut: a perspectival alignment that selects and configures aspects of the flux. To imagine that events have atomic essence is to confuse the act of cutting with the material of the cut. There are no smallest events waiting to be discovered, only finer and finer symbolic distinctions we can choose to make.

The effect of the atomic metaphor is twofold. First, it creates the illusion of ontological finality: if only we can find the indivisible grains of happening, physics will have reached bedrock. Second, it disguises the reflexivity of the very concept of an “event,” which arises not from nature presenting us with discrete units, but from our own semiotic structuring of possibility.

A relational ontology reframes the question entirely. Events are not atoms of reality, but perspectival instantiations within a relational field. To imagine otherwise is to mistake our symbolic partitions for the fabric of the cosmos.