Originally published in The Whirl of ReOrientation on March 31, 2025.
Imagine your mind as a builder, constantly tearing down old ideas and crafting new ones to keep up with life’s twists. That’s the heart of John Boyd’s 1976 essay “Destruction and Creation”—a cycle of breaking apart (destruction) and piecing together (creation) how we see the world. Now, meet a wild idea from physicists Gabriele Carcassi: the shape of things (geometry) and their messiness (entropy) are secretly the same. Carcassi’s insight syncs with Boyd’s vision in a way that’s both mind-blowing and oddly practical.
Boyd argued we survive by staying nimble. When our mental blueprints don’t match reality—like a map that’s gone stale—they stir up confusion (entropy) until they fall apart. From that mess, we build fresh ideas that fit better. Carcassi, digging into how the universe ticks, found something similar: the “shape” of a system (think of it as its layout or structure) tells you how chaotic it is (entropy), and that chaos can reveal the shape right back. It’s like a two-way mirror—one reflects the other perfectly.
Picture this: when Boyd says to smash old thinking, it’s like chaos taking over—everything’s scrambled. Carcassi says that scramble has a hidden shape, measurable in science, and from it, you can rebuild the original layout. Boyd’s next step—making a new plan—mirrors how they use chaos to sketch a fresh structure. Their research shows this isn’t just theory: in the lab, they can flip between shape and messiness like flipping a coin.
Boyd leaned on big thinkers like Gödel and Heisenberg to say no idea is ever fully “done”—there’s always some fuzziness pushing us forward. Carcassi takes it cosmic: the shape of space and time itself might be tied to this chaos-shape dance, hinting it’s not just in our heads but in the stars.
So what? Boyd’s cycle isn’t abstract—it’s how we adapt daily. And if Carcassi is right, it’s also how the universe works: shape and chaos aren’t enemies, they’re partners.
Thoughts?