Around 500 BCE, Heraclitus looked at the world and rejected the comforting idea of permanence. He noticed that rivers flow, fires consume, bodies age, and societies transform. His famous insight—often paraphrased as you cannot step into the same river twice—was not poetic exaggeration. It was a metaphysical claim: reality is not made of static things, but of ongoing processes.
Classical physics eventually echoed this intuition. What looks solid is actually motion at every scale—atoms vibrating, planets orbiting, energy transferring. Even a rock sitting still is not truly still. It is held together by forces in balance, not frozen in time. Stability, in physics, is not the absence of change; it is change arranged in a lasting pattern.
Metaphysically, this challenges how we think about identity. If everything is always changing, what does it mean to be something? Heraclitus’ answer is subtle: identity is not sameness over time, but continuity through change. We persist not because we are unchanged, but because change follows a recognizable path. Flux is not chaos—it is the rule that makes persistence possible at all.