Which physical phenomena are not objects?

Question

I come from the world of OOP programming and I find OOP terms convenient to describe everything that has properties or fields and possibly some actions that may be applied to its properties/fields. Thus a class lists properties, fields and methods, while objects are concrete instances of this class.

It was suggested by @goldilocks that:

Not all physical phenomenon are "objects".

And:

I think there is a lot of confusion about what "physical phenomenon" refers to. It refers to things which can, or could (assuming perfect knowledge) be explained in terms of physics.

What "things" can be explained in terms of physics and at the same time can't be described in terms of objects? Some examples?

Answer 1

Causal powers must be different in kind from the physical objects upon which they act. Consider, for example, F = ma. Rewind history to before we knew it had any problems. For all we knew back then, there was a real causal force which caused all objects to obey it, precisely. That is, there was something awfully like an abstract object, existing timelessly and without location in space, which causes all objects to act as if F = ma. Today, we know that F = ma is only an approximation. However, that's not really a problem, because we can just posit some more sophisticated version—perhaps some form of M-theory—which produces F = ma in some circumstances, a more complex General Relativity in other circumstances, and something even more complex near the event horizons of black holes.

One could try and deny the very idea of causation; Regularity Theory is a view which does this. However, Regularity Theory has some serious problems, as pointed out by Rom Harré in Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity. One could also argue for a kind of causation which is located within spacetime instead of in the "timelessly and without location in space" manner which I discussed, above. However, this would require major changes in how we even think about science; it typically requires that how objects behave is not dependent on spacetime. Furthermore, it is hard not to think that some sort of rationality is required in how objects behave, such that if, say, the physical constants were different in one part of the universe than the other, that there would be an underlying law as to why and how they shift from being one value to another. It seems to keep coming back to laws which hold timelessly and without location in space, which means they are manifestly different from physical objects.

Answer 2

A field in continuus space-time. That would require an infinite memory.

Edit (precision following comments): that would require arrays with real-numbers as indexes, which cannot exist on a digital architecture.

Answer 3

OOP objects are only 'objects in reality' by reference. Right? An actual employee at a a company is an object (but don't tell them that, they don't like it). And that object 'is' (in an odd set-theoretical, naming-relation-upon-equivalence-class-via-relation way) the OOP 'object' that instantiates "class Employee: public Human" because we expect the operations on the latter to represent real facts about the former.

I am not sure it is a good definition, but if the criterion for being a physical phenomenon is the applicability of (some future) physics to them, then all physical phenomena are objects from the OOP point of view, in this same sort of referential way. Physics is stated in laws that take mathematical forms. Any foreseeable physics will still couch its entire range of predictions in the form of a theory with clauses that identify to what the equations apply and then some methods for prediction. That seems to be the form theories take there, and anything that departs significantly from that form in the future, will probably not still be physics.

Such a law is an object, it produces the referents as sub-objects, works on them, and discards them. So an atom is obviously not an OOP 'instance of a class', in reality, but a Bohr atom, or a deBroglie atom is one, because Bohr's and deBroglie's theories are objects and they attach to a certain part of our observational space and force us to re-encode whatever we see or imagine there into a specific finite representation. This is just the same way we encode the employee as "new Employee(...)", only vague and computationally intractable. Those objects will always have the form of an OOP object, just because that is what a theory has become for us -- a list of definitions, conditions and predictions. Then the atom is the object those instances model in the same sense the real, physical employee a the object modeled by our cruder model of 'class Employee'.

[As noted elsewhere at great length I can't buy that definition, because I think we are no longer able to identify what we would and would not accept as a 'physical' theory, except to the degree it is just a form in which we want our science expressed. You can make up math that predicts anything you can imagine, so it begs the question of what is physical just to say it could be described mathematically. ('Reductivist monism' may be well defined but 'physical' is not, anymore.)]

If you are an hard-core idealist, it is a lot more obvious everything to which we can make a reference is an object. Any clear idea of an entity or process is a model (consistent or otherwise) in some category of models, and OOP is just a framing of category theory. But then, if you admit math as ideal, you have to deal with the intrinsic conflict between universality and negation (Russel's paradox).

Something cannot both be ideal and at the same time have to be coped to fit observed problems with its reality. Formalistic solutions to math's boundary-issues discard universal universality -- only some things get to be universal, and the motivations as to which things those are are from practical observation, not principle. To me these are not acceptable solutions from an idealistic point of view, because there is no good idealistic reason to seek them. The few less formalistic, idealist solutions we have found, usually deeply impoverish math, and make it a lot harder to move forward.