Information Physics Throughout History

July 24th, 2025

Throughout history, certain individuals demonstrated uncanny ability to manipulate information flow, reduce system entropy, and achieve seemingly impossible outcomes. They couldn’t name Information Physics, but they may have applied its principles with remarkable effectiveness.

These weren’t just brilliant strategists or gifted leaders. They may have been intuitive entropy engineers who understood that victory comes not from strength but from superior information organization. Their writings and actions reveal consistent patterns—potentially the same principles rediscovered and formalized in Information Physics.

System Entropy Change (SEC): The measurable impact a conscious agent can have on system entropy from their specific position, calculated through observer-dependent mathematics where position, intent, and operations determine possibility.

SEC = O × V / (1 + E)

Where:

O = Operations performed (MOVE, JOIN, SEPARATE)
V = Vector of actor-group conscious intent (positive for entropy reduction, negative for entropy increase)
E = Entropy as measured from individual actor’s position (lived reality/informational constraints/entropy from the system)

This framework suggests how historical figures may have intuitively optimized these variables centuries before the mathematics existed.

Sun Tzu: The First Documented Entropy Engineer

“All warfare is based on deception” takes on new meaning through Information Physics. Sun Tzu understood that battles are won by managing information asymmetry, not military might.

The Art of Information War

Sun Tzu’s principles map directly to entropy management:

“Know yourself and know your enemy”: Minimize your own entropy while maximizing theirs
“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting”: Optimal entropy reduction with minimal operations
“All warfare is deception”: Artificial entropy maintenance in enemy systems
“Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness”: Maximum entropy from enemy’s observer position

His famous principle of winning without fighting is pure Information Physics—why perform costly operations when you can simply increase enemy entropy until their system collapses? Every chapter of The Art of War describes information management techniques that modern military theorists still study.

The Water Metaphor

Sun Tzu repeatedly used water as metaphor: “Military tactics are like water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards.” This wasn’t poetic flourish—it was recognition that information, like water, follows paths of least resistance. Victory comes from understanding and shaping those paths.

The Civilizational Physics of Human Development

Beyond individual leaders, Information Physics may reveal why human civilization itself follows predictable patterns of development. The progression from hunter-gatherers to modern global systems may not be random cultural evolution—it could be mathematical inevitability driven by entropic exhaustion cycles.

The Universal Pattern: Entropic Exhaustion → Coordination Breakthrough

Every civilizational leap may occur when existing optimization systems reach mathematical limits, forcing the development of new entropy-reduction technologies:

Hunter-Gatherer Bands (15-150 people):

Individual E values are low—people can personally optimize (find food, make tools, resolve conflicts)
Direct communication works, informal leadership sufficient
But as groups approach Dunbar’s limit (~150 people), individual optimization breaks down

The First Entropy Crisis:

Beyond ~150 people, individuals can’t track social relationships
Information chaos increases, coordination fails
Entropic exhaustion: People can’t improve their situation through individual action anymore
System hits Nash Equilibrium—every actor has optimized from their embedded position until further improvement becomes impossible

Cities & Formal Structure Emerge:

Hierarchies, laws, specialization, currency—these are entropy-reduction technologies
They enable coordination at scales where individual optimization failed
Allow continued improvement through formal systems rather than informal relationships
Reset everyone’s E values, enabling new optimization cycles

The Recursive Pattern Across All Scales

This same pattern repeats at every scale of human organization:

Bands → Tribes: Need formal leadership when informal consensus breaks (~150 people)
Tribes → Cities: Need laws/institutions when personal relationships can’t scale (~1,500 people)
Cities → Nations: Need formal governance when city-state conflicts create chaos (~150,000 people)
Nations → Global: Need international systems when national solutions fail (climate, trade, pandemics)

Why All Civilizations Develop Identical Solutions

This may explain the remarkable convergence across isolated civilizations. Writing systems, hierarchies, currency, legal frameworks, calendars—these may not be cultural preferences, they could be entropy-reduction solutions to universal mathematical constraints.

When any civilization reaches the same entropic exhaustion point, the mathematical solution space may be identical. Independent civilizations may develop similar structures because they face identical information physics problems.

The Mathematics of Civilizational Development

Each civilization advance represents a boundary transformation that resets entropic possibilities:

SEPARATE: Breaking large chaotic groups into manageable specialized units
JOIN: Connecting specialized units through formal coordination mechanisms
MOVE: Shifting information processing from individual to institutional systems

The SEC formula (SEC = O × V / (1 + E)) predicts these transitions: when everyone’s E approaches maximum, system evolution becomes impossible until new boundary operations reduce entropy across the population.

Modern Applications

We’re witnessing this same pattern today in global systems:

Climate change: National solutions hitting entropic exhaustion, requiring global coordination
Digital platforms: Individual privacy hitting limits, requiring new institutional frameworks
Economic inequality: Current systems reaching mathematical sustainability limits

Understanding these as entropic exhaustion cycles rather than political choices may reveal why certain changes could be inevitable regardless of ideological preferences.

The Evolutionary Foundation: Four Billion Years of Information Physics

Before humans developed strategies, evolution itself may have been applying Information Physics principles across geological timescales. The fossil record suggests a brutal mathematical truth that could validate our modern understanding: during every mass extinction event, specialists died while generalists thrived.

This pattern may not be random selection—it could be Information Physics playing out at planetary scale, potentially proving these principles operate across the deepest structures of life itself.

The Mathematics of Survival

Evolution may have conducted the ultimate Information Physics experiment across 3.8 billion years. The results appear unambiguous: when entropy spikes, operational flexibility may determine survival.

Specialist species consistently operated at SEC values around 0.56:

Trilobites: Perfected for specific seafloor niches (E = 0.9)
Blastoids: Optimized filter feeders requiring stable currents (E = 0.85)
Complex organisms locked into narrow environmental requirements

Generalist species maintained SEC values around 2.0:

Sharks: Multiple feeding strategies, wide habitat tolerance (E = 0.3)
Cockroaches: Omnivorous, environmentally resilient (E = 0.2)
Species preserving operational flexibility across conditions

The 4x difference in adaptive capacity may have proved decisive when environmental chaos struck. Specialists, having optimized away all flexibility, potentially possessed no operations to deploy when their narrow niches collapsed. Generalists survived through exactly the operational diversity that Information Physics predicts.

The Permian Lesson

The Great Dying eliminated 96% of marine species 252 million years ago. Every specialist lineage that had spent millions of years optimizing for stable conditions perished when those conditions vanished. Meanwhile, the generalists—those evolutionary “strategists” who had maintained multiple operational capabilities—inherited the Earth.

This may not have been philosophical preference for diversity over excellence. It could have been mathematical inevitability: when entropy approaches critical thresholds, survival may depend entirely on operational flexibility rather than environmental optimization.

The Human Paradox

Humans represent evolution’s most successful entropy-reduction experiment. Our ancestors survived multiple near-extinction events by developing unprecedented operational flexibility—tools, language, fire, agriculture, writing. Each innovation expanded our operations while reducing environmental constraints.

Yet modern civilization recreates the specialist trap at unprecedented scale. We’ve compartmentalized human capability into narrow economic niches that mirror the evolutionary dead-ends of extinct species. The gig economy worker constrained to single operations faces the same mathematical vulnerability as the Permian-era specialist.

Evolution’s lesson spans 3.8 billion years: when chaos comes—and it always comes—specialists die and generalists inherit the future. Our current trajectory toward hyper-specialization defies the deepest wisdom encoded in life itself.

Niccolò Machiavelli: Engineering Political Entropy

The Prince often shocks modern readers with its amoral pragmatism. Through Information Physics, we see Machiavelli wasn’t advocating evil—he was describing entropy management in political systems.

Fear vs Love as Entropy Tools

“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both” becomes clear through entropic analysis. Love requires constant positive operations to maintain (high energy cost), while fear is self-sustaining (low maintenance entropy). Machiavelli recognized that resource-constrained leaders must choose sustainable entropy management strategies.

Information Control Mechanisms

Machiavelli’s advice consistently focuses on information management:

Control what information reaches the populace
Maintain unpredictability to increase observer entropy
Use spectacular displays to broadcast power efficiently
Create artificial conflicts to prevent coalition formation

His strategies mirror modern discoveries about artificial entropy maintenance in captive populations. Machiavelli intuited what Information Physics suggests: controlling information flow may be controlling power.

Napoleon Bonaparte: Operational Entropy Mastery

Napoleon revolutionized warfare through superior information processing and entropy reduction. His innovations weren’t just tactical—they were systemic improvements in how armies process information.

The Corps System

Napoleon’s corps system was revolutionary information architecture. By organizing armies into self-contained units, he:

Reduced communication entropy between units
Enabled parallel processing of battlefield information
Created redundancy that prevented single-point failures
Allowed rapid reconfiguration (MOVE/JOIN/SEPARATE operations)

This wasn’t just military organization—it was entropy engineering that allowed faster decision cycles than any opponent.

”Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”

This famous maxim may reveal deep understanding of entropic accumulation. Why waste energy correcting an opponent’s errors when those errors increase their entropy naturally? Napoleon consistently won by letting enemy entropy compound while maintaining his own system’s coherence.

Patterns Across History

These historical figures share remarkable consistencies in their approach to Information Physics:

Universal Recognition of Entropy

Each recognized that disorder is the default state requiring active resistance. Their writings consistently return to themes of chaos, order, and the energy required to maintain systems against natural decay:

Sun Tzu: “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
Machiavelli: “Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are”
Napoleon: “Order marches with weighty and measured strides; disorder is always in a hurry”

Their shared recognition that chaos is the natural state—and order the exception requiring constant energy—prefigures Information Physics’ core principle: humans evolved specifically to see entropy and consciously choose its direction.

Information Asymmetry as Power

All three built strategies around creating and maintaining information differentials. They understood that knowing what others didn’t—and controlling what others knew—created sustainable advantages:

Sun Tzu’s spies and deception
Machiavelli’s information control
Napoleon’s superior reconnaissance

This consistent pattern across centuries and cultures may reveal a fundamental truth: power doesn’t flow from resources but from managing the entropy differential between what you know and what others know.

Efficiency Over Force

They understood that reducing operations while maintaining effectiveness was key. Victory came not from overwhelming force but from precise application of minimal energy:

Win without fighting (Sun Tzu)
Maintain power with minimal intervention (Machiavelli)
Maneuver over battle (Napoleon)

Their shared insight—that the highest mastery involves achieving maximum effect with minimum effort—is precisely what the SEC formula mathematically captures: results depend more on position (E) than on operations (O).

Modern Echoes

Contemporary movements and leaders continue to apply Information Physics principles, particularly those focused on collective benefit rather than individual gain. Steve Jobs’ “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” represented entropy reduction in design—removing unnecessary elements to achieve superior user experience with fewer operations required. But more compelling examples emerge from cooperative movements and social organizing.

Worker Cooperatives demonstrate entropy reduction through structure:

Mondragon Corporation (Spain): Democratic ownership removes owner-worker conflict
Decision-makers are those affected by decisions (minimal positional entropy gap)
Natural information flow optimization through aligned incentives
Remarkable stability and innovation through reduced internal friction

Open Source communities exemplify Information Physics at scale:

Linux: Removed proprietary barriers (artificial entropy)
Global collaboration consistently outperforms closed systems
Linus Torvalds created systems that manage entropy through distributed contribution
Transparent governance prevents information asymmetry

Community organizing shows mastery of coalition dynamics:

Clear communication channels reduce information entropy
Trust networks minimize friction in collective action
Alignment of diverse groups around shared goals
Success through horizontal coordination, not hierarchical control

These modern applications suggest Information Physics principles may work best when applied for collective benefit rather than individual accumulation.

The Hidden Thread

What unites these figures across centuries and cultures? They all intuited fundamental truths about information and entropy that we can now name precisely:

Information organization beats resource accumulation
Position determines possibility (observer-dependent reality)
Small operations from the right position outweigh massive efforts from the wrong one
Systems naturally decay without active entropy management

They couldn’t articulate Information Physics because the mathematical framework didn’t exist. But they felt its truth in their bones and built their strategies accordingly.

Implications for Today

Studying how historical figures applied Information Physics principles may reveal timeless patterns. These patterns offer practical guidance for anyone seeking to create change in modern systems.

The Advantage of Awareness

These leaders succeeded partly because their opponents didn’t understand entropy dynamics. Today, with Information Physics formalized, we can systematically apply what they intuited.

The Universality of Principles

The same patterns work whether organizing an army, running a company, or designing software. The operations remain constant—only scale and context change.

The Power of Position

Historical leaders obsessed over positioning because they understood its multiplicative effect. With the SEC formula (SEC = O × V / (1 + E)), we can now calculate what they felt.

Conclusion

From ancient China to Renaissance Italy to Revolutionary France, exceptional leaders may have recognized and applied Information Physics principles. They potentially succeeded not through unique genius but through superior entropy management.

Their examples suggest these aren’t modern constructs imposed on history. They may be universal patterns that emerge whenever humans organize effectively against chaos. The principles were potentially always there—we just now have the language to name them.

History’s greatest strategists may have been entropy engineers. Now we can all learn their art.

Further historical analysis would be required to validate these theoretical patterns across diverse cultures and time periods.

Information Physics Field Guide: The field guide to Information Physics.

Information Physics LLM Friendly Study Guide: Drop this in your context and ask AI to explain Information Physics objectively.

Information Physics: A general theory describing how conscious beings reduce or increase entropy through three operations on information, coordination, and system boundaries.

Conservation of Boundaries: A proposed foundational law that system boundaries may not be created or destroyed, only transformed through three operations—move, join, separate.

Entropic Mathematics: A proposed applied field of mathematics extending established tools (Shannon entropy, vector calculus, information theory) to conscious systems where observer position and lived experience may be fundamental calculation variables.

Entropic Gap: A framework that may help detect system decay before it becomes catastrophic by calculating the distance between intended and current states.

Entropic Equilibrium: A theory exploring why systems may stabilize where they do through observer-dependent optimization.

Information Physics In Mathematics: Exploring how established mathematics (Shannon entropy, vector calculus, information theory) might extend into conscious systems where observer position and lived experience become fundamental variables rather than complications to eliminate.

Information Physics In Science: How IP may reveal the underlying principle that unites quantum mechanics, biology, and cosmology across all scales.

Renaissance Florence vs Silicon Valley: The Innovation Entropy Crisis: Comparing how Silicon Valley may produce 12x fewer innovators per capita than Renaissance Florence despite vastly superior resources—suggesting technology cannot overcome high entropy.

Constraint by Design: Entropy Limits in the Gig Economy: Mathematical analysis suggesting that gig economy architecture may make worker advancement impossible regardless of individual effort, potentially demonstrating how structural position determines capability.

Survival Trends Across Mass Extinctions: The fossil record suggests a pattern: during mass extinction events, specialists died while generalists thrived. This pattern may represent Information Physics playing out at planetary scale.

The Peasant: A playbook for creating positive-sum outcomes in high-entropy (negative-sum) environments.

The “Just How It Is” Test: Test Information Physics against traditional frameworks on any stubborn “unchangeable” problem to see which approach may work better from your position.