Physics Without Totality: 2 Event Horizons and the Limits of Eventhood

The moment we speak of events, we are already speaking from somewhere. Yet physics — in its classical ambition to integrate the world into a single ledger — treats events as if they were absolute, like tally marks that exist independently of the counter. Singularities, frozen moments, and the so-called “end of time” are the inevitable offspring of this overreach. They are artefacts, not phenomena.

Frame-Relative Eventhood

An event is never “there” in itself; it is always here, relative to a frame. Two observers in relative motion may witness the same collision of particles, yet describe their temporal ordering differently. Neither is wrong; neither is complete. Eventhood is perspectival — a cut from the potentiality of the system to the actuality of experience. Attempting to extract a universal timestamp is like insisting that every shadow must converge into a single, global silhouette. Shadows only exist in relation to the light and the surface that catches them.

From a relational perspective, then, events are construals, not carriers of intrinsic existence. They appear and actualise only in their relational context. To insist otherwise is to demand an impossible integration, the very kind that births singularities.

Non-Integrable Temporal Descriptions

Some sequences of events resist any global stitching. Mathematicians call these non-integrable fields; physicists encounter them near horizons and within curved spacetimes. The lesson is simple but often ignored: not all temporal structures are reducible to a single, linear account. When we attempt to fold multiple incompatible perspectives into one narrative, we produce artifacts: “time freezes,” breakdowns, and paradoxes emerge — not because the universe halts, but because our integrative ambition exceeds what can be coherently actualised.

This is not merely a technical observation. It is a profound epistemic warning: the universe has no obligation to satisfy our desire for seamless, global comprehension. Horizons, in this sense, are not edges of reality but edges of integrability.

The Mistake of Demanding a Single Story

Human thought — and classical physics — instinctively searches for the singular story, the one coherent plot into which all local narratives might fold. But this is a category error. Events do not exist on a global ledger; they exist as relational instantiations. To conflate the potential network of actualised events with a universal, integrable timeline is to misread the structure of actuality itself.

Paradoxes, breakdowns, and singularities appear when we make this mistake. They are not features of the cosmos; they are artefacts of our epistemic insistence on totalisation. Escher, of course, knew this intuitively: each local staircase obeys perfect logic, yet the global arrangement becomes impossible. So too with time and eventhood.

Relational Takeaway

No moment “freezes,” no event truly disappears. Horizons mark the limits of global description, not the end of occurrence. What physics teaches, when read relationally, is that the universe does not conform to our desire for totalising narratives. It continues to actualise, locally and perspectivally, indifferent to our integrative ambition.

To think relationally is to relinquish the God’s-eye ledger. We move from singular narratives to networks of perspectival actualisations, from frozen singularities to fluid horizons of eventhood. This is the terrain we now occupy — and the stage upon which the next post will show why a “view from nowhere” is not just unhelpful, but epistemically misleading.