Free Three Roads to Quantum Gravity by Lee Smolin

the reverse.
    We humans seem to be fascinated by our ability to hold back change for long periods of time. This may be why painting and sculpture are so fascinating and so valuable, for they offer the illusion of time stopped. But time cannot be stopped. A marble sculpture may look the same from day to day, but it is not: each day the surface becomes a little different as the marble interacts with the air. As the Florentines have learned only too well from the damage wrought to their heritage by pollution, marble is not an inert thing, it is a process. All the skill of the artist cannot turn a process into a thing, for there are no things, only processes that appear to change slowly on our human timescales. Even objects that seem not to change, like rocks and can openers, have stories. It is just that the timescale over which they change significantly is longer than for most other things. Geologists and cultural historians are very interested in narrating the stories of rocks and can openers.
    So there are not really two categories of things in the world: objects and processes. There are only relatively fast processes and relatively slow processes. And whether it is a short story or a long story, the only kind of explanation of a process that is truly adequate is a story.
    The illusion that the world consists of objects is behind many of the constructs of classical science. Supposing one wants to describe a particular elementary particle, say a proton. In the Newtonian mode of description one would describe what it is at a particular moment of time: where it is located in space, what its mass and electric charge are, and so forth. This is called describing the ‘state’ of the particle. Time is nowhere in
this description; it is, indeed, an optional part of the Newtonian world. Once one has adequately described how something is, one then ‘turns on’ time and describes how it changes. To test a theory, one makes a series of measurements. Each measurement is supposed to reveal the state of the particle, frozen at some moment of time. A series of measurements is like a series of movie stills - they are all frozen moments.
    The idea of a state in Newtonian physics shares with classical sculpture and painting the illusion of the frozen moment. This gives rise to the illusion that the world is composed of objects. If this were really the way the world is, then the primary description of something would be how it is, and change in it would be secondary. Change would be nothing but alterations in how something is. But relativity and quantum theory each tell us that this is not how the world is. They tell us - no, better, they scream at us - that our world is a history of processes. Motion and change are primary. Nothing is, except in a very approximate and temporary sense. How something is, or what its state is, is an illusion. It may be a useful illusion for some purposes, but if we want to think fundamentally we must not lose sight of the essential fact that ‘is’ is an illusion. So to speak the language of the new physics we must learn a vocabulary in which process is more important than, and prior to, stasis. Actually there is already available a suitable and very simple language which you will have no trouble understanding.
    From this new point of view, the universe consists of a large number of events. An event may be thought of as the smallest part of a process, a smallest unit of change. But do not think of an event as a change happening to an otherwise static object. It is just a change, no more than that.
    The universe of events is a relational universe. That is, all its properties are described in terms of relationships between the events. The most important relationship that two events can have is causality. This is the same notion of causality that we found was essential to make sense of stories. We say that an event, let us call it A, is in part the cause of another event, B, if A was necessary for B to occur. If