Everything only happens once

I like the definition of an event that physicists use.

When physicists say event, they mean something that happened at a point in space, at a point in time.

Since time moves only forward and moves constantly, there is no such thing as the same event. No single event ever happens twice; no two events are ever alike.

I feel like there’s a lot of wisdom buried in that simple concept. We love to think that events are “alike” or that they happen “again and again throughout history” or that we can deduce decision-making rules to apply to “similar events.”

But for physics, there really is no such thing as similar events. A lot of time, I think, we’re placing way too much on the idea of the “same” event.