IP Field Guide: A Practitioner's Journey from Maximum Entropy to Universal Principles

July 24th, 2025

A practitioner’s journey from maximum entropy to universal principles.

What if the most profound physics discoveries don’t happen in laboratories or lecture halls, but in maximum-security prisons, welfare systems, and corporate boardrooms?

What if the mathematics governing galaxy formation also explains why some people thrive in chaos while others break?

I’ve spent fifteen years testing this question in humanity’s highest-entropy environments. The patterns I found either represent the most elaborate delusion in scientific history, or they reveal how consciousness navigates reality itself.

Here’s what I know: I’m either completely wrong about everything and seeing patterns where there are none, or I’ve stumbled onto principles so universal they connect quantum mechanics to organizational behavior through a single mathematical framework.

The evidence suggests the latter. But you’ll have to judge for yourself.

Here’s the contraints I’m working within: no formal education, no stable parental guidance (though my mother was doing her absolute best given her position in the universe—love you, Mom! 💜), and fifteen years navigating systems where official descriptions bore zero resemblance to actual dynamics.

This forced me into a first-principled practitioner-theorist mindset from an early age by necessity. Build and test in the mud first. Step back to examine why things work. When you’re consistently confronted with stark contradictions—prison labeled as “rehabilitation,” developer tools that create developer friction, leadership theory that produces terrible leaders—you develop pattern recognition or you don’t survive.

The mathematics I discovered either explains why these contradictions exist everywhere, or I’ve created history’s most elaborate rationalization system.

Einstein discovered relativity on a train by recognizing that physics depends on reference frame. Nash found optimal strategies by studying actual games, not abstract theory. Both understood that the observer’s position directly changes the mathematics.

This principle applies universally. Your perspective shapes what you can measure.

So with that framing in mind, I ask two things of you:

Honor lived experience as the most valuable information source. Even Einstein and Nash would have been wrong without considering their direct observations.
Judge the theory on its merits, not traditional academic credentials. I don’t have a PhD, but I have something else—nine complete identity transformations across maximum-entropy systems.

Ready? Let’s discover what happens when you follow patterns to their logical conclusion.

The Entropy Laboratory

What happens when an eight-year-old discovers that every adult system lies about how it actually works?

My earliest memories involve navigating systems where official rules bore no relation to actual dynamics. Family court promised protection but delivered chaos. Social services claimed to help families but systematically destroyed them. Welfare advertised stability and assistance while preventing my mother from ever actually escaping poverty.

Three juvenile detention facilities. Two mental health facilities. Each had beautiful documented processes. Noble stated goals.

None worked as advertised.

Real information—who actually held power, how decisions really got made, what genuinely helped versus what looked good on paper—flowed through hidden channels. Visible only from inside the system. The official flowcharts were fiction. The actual information architecture was completely different.

I moved fourteen times by age twenty across populations that couldn’t be more different. Each time I was forced to navigate a new system, adopt a new reference frame, and learn a new set of rules.

Then came prison.

Six years in maximum-entropy environments where I discovered something that still makes me angry at a society that claims to be rehabilitating people: the chaos wasn’t accidental.

It was engineered entropy. Deliberately maintained as a control mechanism.

Here’s what nobody tells you about prison: it’s not designed to rehabilitate. It’s designed to maintain exactly enough chaos to prevent what I started doing—optimizing information flow to reduce conflicts and create stability. To create actual opportunities for people to thrive.

When you apply positive-sum thinking in systems designed for zero-sum chaos, the results are immediate. Dramatic. The yard became calmer. Conflicts decreased. Information flowed efficiently. People started solving problems instead of creating them.

That’s when I learned the lesson that changed everything.

Calm is more dangerous to control systems than chaos.

Let that sink in.

My systematic entropy reduction threatened institutional power so directly it required immediate intervention. Transfer to disrupt the emerging order.

And yes, I realize how this sounds. “Formerly incarcerated tech leader claims to have discovered universal principles.” But the mathematics don’t care about my credentials. They either work or they don’t. 🤷🏻‍♂️

This shift from chaos to order follows patterns described by chaos theory, where small changes create bifurcations and fundamentally different system behaviors.

But I wouldn’t understand the mathematics for another fifteen years.

Pattern Recognition Across Scales

Take a breath. I know that was heavy. But here’s where it gets interesting—these patterns weren’t unique to prison.

The transition from maximum-security facilities to community college to corporate boardrooms should have felt like traveling to different planets.

Instead, it revealed something that made me question everything.

The same patterns appeared everywhere. Just at different intensities.

The information architecture I’d learned to navigate in prison—who really held power, how decisions actually got made, what worked versus what looked good—was identical in software engineering. Same dynamics in developer relations. Same patterns in every organization I encountered.

Each transition provided new vantage points. What researchers call “parallax.” The same system looks completely different from different positions, yet the underlying mathematical patterns remain constant.

A CEO and a prisoner face identical constraint navigation problems. They just operate at different scales with different tools.

DevRel proved crucial.

Speaking with thousands of developers revealed the same patterns everywhere. Each conversation added data points. Every organization type showed identical dynamics.

I was doing entropy engineering without naming it. Over years, specific patterns crystallized into frameworks. They worked universally. But I didn’t understand why.

My prison experience had instilled a drive to ensure others had access to more opportunity than I’d had. This manifested as reverse-engineering successful approaches. Developing shared language for intuitive processes. Providing practical tools for others.

Turns out I was onto something.

The Framework Evolution

What started as survival instinct evolved into systematic understanding. Each environment I navigated—from maximum security to Silicon Valley—revealed another piece of the universal puzzle. The patterns were always there, waiting to be formalized. I just needed the right language to describe what I’d been seeing all along.

The Pyramid of Challenge (2017)

Building an engineering team at Major League Soccer, I needed to distribute challenge appropriately across all levels.

The framework that emerged—high complexity/low availability at the top, low complexity/high availability at the base—worked perfectly.

Only later did I realize this was information density optimization in action. Teams thrived when challenge matched capacity. Natural information flow emerged from strategic decisions to tactical execution.

Developer Advocate’s Guides Series (2020-2022)

At Apollo GraphQL and during consulting, I developed frameworks around common organizational problems.

The guides became some of my most referenced content. DX Audits are now standard in the DevRel toolbelt.

Each framework solved immediate problems while revealing deeper patterns about information flow and entropy reduction.

Keystone Paradox and Lava Leadership (2024)

Two frameworks brought me closer to understanding everything was about information flow.

The Keystone Paradox identified how essential individuals become organizational bottlenecks. Their irreplaceability creates information constraints.

Lava Leadership showed how strategic thinking can navigate organizational information gradients $(\eta\nabla)$ from any position. Like magma finding paths through rock.

Both frameworks optimized information movement through human systems. Several more emerged, all addressing what I now recognize as three fundamental challenges.

The Cascade of Discovery

Once I recognized the pattern, discoveries came as an accelerating cascade. Each revealed the next. The complete architecture emerged in roughly three months.

May 28, 2025 - 12:11 AM: The Symmetry Shock

I was reverse-engineering a recovery device solution at midnight when the pattern hit me like a physical blow.

All my biggest impacts—in prison, in corporate environments, in developer relations—came from the same three operations: transforming boundaries to reduce friction.

But the insight felt incomplete. When I shared it, I received valid feedback: attributing values like “resistance” and “quality” to systems felt categorical without deeper mathematical explanation.

My first Discord message captured the moment: “Kurt Kemple — 5/28/25, 12:11AM while trying to reverse engineer how I was able to solve the recovery problem, I may have inadvertently discovered a pattern for quantifying architectural innovation success (non-discovery, non-mechanical, etc) please help me disprove so I can go to sleep 😭”

The first version of what would become Entropic Mechanics was born that day:

\text{Actual Impact } = \frac{\text{Operations } \times \text{ Quality}}{1 + \text{Resistance}}

But without proper mathematical grounding, I tabled it as potential pattern-matching overreach.

Only later, when discovering related sciences, did pieces click. Shared intent revealed Quality as vector $\mathbf{V}$ . Shannon and Landauer showed Resistance as positional energy multiplier $\eta$ . Research into innovations solidified operations as boundary transformations enabling entropy organization.

June 2025 - The Alarm Bell

A presentation about Net Promoter Score and changing user bases triggered the next insight.

Someone asked if Monthly Active Users trends stayed aligned with user sentiment or remained steady.

A straight-forward question anyone is likely to ask, yet alarm bells rang in my head.

This didn’t match my experience working daily with developers sharing their lived reality. Developers—anyone really—often have to use tools that aren’t quite aligned with their actual job-to-be-done. This creates friction. Entropy.

The reason became clear: separating usage from lived experience—creating an unnecessary abstraction between reality and observation—created entropy for anyone downstream.

From my position in the system, I could see what others couldn’t.

Metrics have a way of removing us from equations.

Frustration Coalitions (FC) and Sentiment-Inertia Index (Sii) emerged four days after that meeting.

I dove into research validating patterns I was seeing. First for Slack. Then the broader B2B SaaS market.

Validation was immediate. Our research team confirmed patterns. A YC founder emailed specifically calling out how my blog post described the strategy they were using to outmaneuver a dominant incumbent.

During FC creation, I discovered Coalition Theory / Game Theory and saw striking resemblance to my six-stage framework. This led to Network Theory. Complexity Science. Percolation Theory. Finally Information Theory.

Each field confirmed patterns I’d observed independently.

July 2025 - The Acceleration

Once I started exploring related sciences, connections accelerated exponentially.

When I connected Entropic Mechanics to potential causal mechanisms behind Nash Equilibrium (Solution Concepts and Equilibria), I became certain I was onto something legitimate rather than pattern-matching delusion.

Over the next 12-13 weeks, Information Physics, Entropic Mechanics, and Conservation of Boundaries evolved from rough insights to theoretical framework.

Each discovery built on the previous. Created internally consistent explanations for phenomena across all scales.

Information Physics Emerges

What if consciousness isn’t separate from physics, but represents physics applied to information systems?

Information Physics emerged from a simple recognition: every organized system—from quarks to civilizations—operates under identical dual constraints. They require energy to maintain order (entropic constraint). They exist within defined limits (systemic boundaries).

Conscious beings evolved to navigate these constraints using time, information, and tools.

The breakthrough insight connected three universal patterns:

Scale invariance: Systems from quantum to cosmic face identical mathematical constraints.
Navigation evolution: Consciousness represents a mechanism for navigating rather than merely obeying constraints.
Information transcendence: Using time, information, and tools, we can navigate possibility space collectively. Expand beyond individual cognition limits. Transcend the default constraints of the universe.

When I examined organizational patterns through this lens, I realized they addressed three core challenges:

Creating signal from noise: Information flow optimization.
Creating clarity from boundary complexity: Workflow optimization through boundary operations.
Enabling entropy engineering: Swarming behaviors to reduce system entropy.

The patterns clicked.

Every framework I’d created. Every system I’d optimized. Every pattern I’d recognized.

They all addressed these fundamental challenges!

Investigating historical innovations like calendars and pyramids, watching the theory pass Occam’s Razor test after test, I became nauseous from implications.

Then I started exploring more connections to established science.

The connection to physics wasn’t metaphorical. Ginestra Bianconi’s work on quantum relative entropy suggests gravity itself might be an information phenomenon. Claude Shannon established mathematical equivalence between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy.

The patterns weren’t similar to physics. They potentially were physics applied to complex systems.

Traditional mathematics abstracts away observers to describe universal behavior. $2+2=4$ regardless of who’s looking.

Information Physics accounts for conscious beings who can choose to change the universe, not just observe it.

What happens when someone sees an apple fall and discovers gravity? How does mathematics account for that?

Heat affects cognition. Fatigue reduces decisions. Stress limits perspective. Resource constraints shape choices.

The observer can’t be removed from calculations because consciousness exists in physics.

The same observer-dependence in relativity and quantum mechanics applies to human systems.

We evolved not just to survive entropy, but to navigate it. Using time and information to chart paths through constraint. Tools to navigate the constraints themselves.

Information Physics provides mathematical framework for conscious agents embedded in entropic reality. Models how we perceive constraints, process information, and act over time.

The Core Axiom of Information Physics: All organized systems are entropically constrained and systemically bounded—and even tools we invent to navigate constraints are themselves constrained and bounded. Consciousness is the one lever that keeps finding new ways to navigate possibility space, using only time, information, and tools.

Collision Theory

Having a core axiom was a start, but something nagged at me.

The axiom seemed to explain everything—Information Physics, Conservation of Boundaries, Entropic Mechanics—all flowed naturally from it.

Yet I couldn’t shake a fundamental violation of first principles: if this axiom was causal for everything else, what caused the axiom itself?

The answer came while exploring information decay.

I’d been studying how information can’t be created faster than it’s destroyed. A fundamental asymmetry built into reality. Combined with the mathematical fact that there’s no identity operation (no way to not change), you get a universe that must always be transforming.

Always mixing. Always diffusing.

What if our entire universe is just… mixing?

What if the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion from nothing, but the moment two pure, highly ordered information states touched?

When they collided, the information boundary collision mechanism created the most enormous information processing spike in cosmic history. The “bang” itself as pure information dynamics.

This led to the collision-diffusion equation that governs all cosmic evolution:

$\frac{\partial \phi}{\partial t} = D(z)\,\nabla^2 \phi - R_{\mathrm{info}}(z)$

The CDE-EVL model I developed achieves $RMS \approx 27.67\%$ accuracy (v1.1) across cosmic structure formation using only two fitted parameters with chemistry-complexity modulation. Standard cosmology needs six or more parameters.

The model shows remarkable precision at critical epochs: proto-galaxies (z=10) with only 2.76% error, intermediate structures (z=5) at 6.63% error, and peak star formation (z=2) at 17.74% error. This exceptional high-redshift accuracy suggests the collision-diffusion mechanism captures the fundamental physics of early universe structure formation.

z	Observed (Mly)	v1.1 Model	v1.1 Error
0	35.000	47.481	+35.66%
1	20.000	10.642	-46.79%
2	5.000	4.113	-17.74%
5	1.000	0.934	-6.63%
10	0.500	0.514	+2.76%

For complete validation data across all scales—cosmic, biological, human systems, and consciousness—see the comprehensive validation tables.

The universe isn’t just a mixing zone. It’s a boundary information processing system.

We’re conscious navigators within it.

The constraints I’d been studying weren’t rules imposed on reality. They were inevitable dynamics of existing inside a massive reaction-diffusion system.

The Complete Framework

What began as practical frameworks for organizational friction evolved into comprehensive understanding.

The patterns I’d observed reflected fundamental principles governing all organized reality.

Four interconnected discoveries form a theoretical framework describing universal dynamics.

1. Collision Theory: The Cosmic Foundation

The universe began as boundary information collision. The information boundary collision mechanism created mixing dynamics driving all subsequent evolution.

This provides causal mechanism for universal constraints.

Key equation:

\frac{\partial \phi}{\partial t} = D(z)\,\nabla^2 \phi - R_{\mathrm{info}}(z)

Empirical validation: RMS error $\approx 27.67\%$ (v1.1) for cosmic structure formation across multiple epochs with only two fitted parameters, achieving remarkable 2.76% accuracy at z=10.

2. Electromagnetic Voxel Lattice: The Discrete Substrate

Spacetime consists of discrete electromagnetic voxels. Information propagates through fundamental hops. This establishes the speed of light and mass-energy relationships.

Core relationships:

c = \frac{\ell_v}{\tau_v}, \quad E = mc^2 = N_{\mathrm{bits}} k_B T \ln 2

Optimization principles: Golden ratio and prime numbers provide optimal arrangements for information processing efficiency.

Consciousness evolved as boundary information navigation mechanism. Uses three-resource toolkit: time, information, and tools.

Historical validation through convergent evolution across civilizations demonstrates mathematical necessity of optimal solutions.

Memory efficiency:

\eta_{\mathrm{mem}} = \frac{I_{\mathrm{stored}}}{I_{\mathrm{total}}}

Observer-dependent mathematics enabling conscious agents to influence system entropy evolution. Strategic operation selection within lattice constraints.

Primary equation:

\mathrm{SEC} = \frac{\mathcal{O} \cdot \mathbf{V}}{1+\eta}

Scale invariance: Same mathematical framework applies from quantum to cosmic scales with different physical parameters.

This framework suggests identical mathematical principles govern everything. Quantum interactions. Stellar evolution. Galactic formation. Neural networks. Organizational behavior. Civilizational development.

If validated, it represents unified description of conscious system navigation across all scales.

The complete empirical validation—including biological systems, human organizations, consciousness evolution, and technological applications—is available in the comprehensive validation section of the complete guide.

The Journey Continues

Here’s where I need your help.

I’ve carried this theory as far as I can alone. You could say I’ve hit my own entropic exhaustion— $(\Delta \mathrm{SEC} / \Delta \mathcal{O} \approx 0)$ .

Further progress is impossible without collaboration.

But here’s what I know works: whether you’re optimizing a team of five, changing a system of millions, or contemplating galactic mergers, the same mathematical principles apply.

The same operations remain constant.

Only scale and constraints change.

Welcome to Information Physics.

I’m asking you to help carry it forward. Test the theory against your own high-entropy systems. Break it where it’s wrong. Build on it where it’s right.

Let’s see if we can answer this question together:

How does consciousness navigate reality?

The frameworks work. The mathematics align. The patterns persist across scales.

But the most important validation comes from you. Testing these principles in your own constraint navigation challenges. Discovering your own optimization strategies. Contributing your own lived experience to humanity’s most precious resource.

Arriving here feels inevitable and impossible at the same time… but maybe that’s exactly what discovery should feel like.