Events as Things

In physics discourse, events are often treated as if they were discrete objects — already-located occurrences with determinate positions in spacetime. An event, in this construal, is a “thing that happens” at a point: a raindrop falling in Bengaluru, a particle collision in Geneva, a supernova in a distant galaxy. Events are reified as substances occupying the grid of spacetime, as though they were natural furniture of the cosmos.

But this way of speaking hides more than it reveals. It conceals the act of construal that makes an “event” legible in the first place. To call something an event is not to pick out a self-standing entity but to perform a cut — a perspectival alignment across a field of potential. We decide, symbolically and operationally, where to draw the boundary: which differences count, which continuities are bracketed, which scales of process are foregrounded.

From a relational standpoint, events are not pre-given parcels of reality waiting to be discovered. They are symbolic instantiations: perspectival slices through ongoing possibility. A raindrop is not an event simply because it fell; it becomes an event when construed as such, against a background of potential histories, instruments, and interpretive frames.

This matters acutely in quantum and gravitational physics. The Feynmanian program, for instance, builds on the idea of events and histories as basic units of description. Yet to take events as things-in-themselves is to smuggle in a classical ontology by stealth. It freezes relational potential into punctual facts, obscuring the reflexive act of carving that makes them visible at all.

Treating events as things also introduces an ontological illusion of finality. If the event is “already there,” then probability appears as a mysterious add-on, a hidden property waiting to be revealed. If instead we understand events as perspectival cuts, probability itself becomes reflexive: a weighting of possible construals, not an intrinsic attribute of a thing.

To resist the reification of events is not to deny their efficacy. Events are powerful symbolic anchors for science, structuring shared worlds of observation, prediction, and explanation. But they are never ontological atoms. They are always relational, always situated, always products of construal.

Against events as things, we affirm events as cuts: provisional alignments through which meaning and matter co-constitute each other. They are not the bedrock of reality but the scaffolding of our engagement with it.