always now here and now there

   

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If we look at a stone, it stays still. But if we could see its atoms, we would observe them to be always now here and now there, in ceaseless vibration. Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting micro events. 

[...] As the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950's, with a beautiful phrase: "An object is a monotonous process." A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while, before melting again into the sea.

What is a wave, which moves on water without carrying with it any drop of water? 

A wave is not an object, in the sense that it is not made of matter that travels with it. The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous.

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of "things" that are in this or that state but in terms of "processes" instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another. The properties of "things" manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction—that is to say, at the edges of the processes—and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one.


—Carlo Rovelli
Reality Is Not What It Seems

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