In April 1977, at the age of 18, not knowing about Fantappiè’s works, I formulated the entropy / syntropy hypothesis just few months before enrolling to University. Suddenly, as it often happens, I had a simple intuition: “Why can’t we have an additional level of reality, a pillar of reality just like matter and energy?” I started thinking of reality as matter, energy and a third level which had properties symmetrical to those of physical energy. While physical energy is diverging, this other energy had converging properties. While physical energy follows the law of entropy and of cause and effect, converging energy is goal oriented and follows a backward-in-time causality in which effects precede their causes. Physical energy is determined by the past, converging energy is determined by the future! I named this additional level syntropy, from the union of the Greek words syn=converging and tropos=tendency.
The incredible and profound implications of this theory in the fields of consciousness, psychology and spirituality led me to enroll in the Faculty of Psychology, although I was gifted in mathematics and physics. But, the mechanistic and deterministic explanations provided by psychoanalysts and behavioral scientists, and the way experiments were carried out on animals, made me regret my choice. I soon focused on the theoretical aspect of my theory and the tutor of my final dissertation was an astrophysicist. After ending psychology I decided to enroll in a PhD in statistics. Vittorio Castellano, the dean of the Faculty of Statistics of the University of Rome, immediately recognized in my work the syntropy theory of Luigi Fantappiè. But since Fantappiè’s Unitary Theory was still unavailable, I ended developing my theory independently.
In 1991 a small editor republished Fantappiè’s Unitary Theory. I was awestruck by how perfectly it matched with what I had been developing in the last 15 years.
Castellano was enthusiastic. But, when he died in the mid-1990s, no one else showed any interest. In 1996, in an attempt to communicate this theory in a simple way, I wrote the novel “Syntropy, the theorem of love.”[1] After a brief moment of popularity, everything went back to standstill. I was on the point of giving up, when on January the 7th 2001 I met Antonella Vannini. We engaged on the tenth of January 2001 (10.01.01) and married on the tenth of October 2001 (10.10.01): the same date, but upside-down (at least in Europe!). As a wedding present, I gave Antonella the possibility to go back to university. She chose cognitive psychology, but had no interest for the entropy / syntropy theory. While working on her first thesis, “Fractal models of consciousness,” she came across the “Dual-Time Supercausality”[2] paper by Chris King and the fundamental equations from which the entropy / syntropy theory starts. She suddenly became interested in this theory and changed her thesis in “Entropy and Syntropy from mechanical to life sciences,” which was published in 2005 in the NeuroQuantology Journal. She continued working on this theory in her master thesis and in her PhD, where she conducted experiments on the pre-stimuli reactions of the heart.
Basically the energy, momentum, mass equation of Special Relativity:
E2 = m2c4 + p2c2
– where E is energy, m is mass, p momentum and c the constant of the speed of light –
tells that the substance is one “Energy” and the forces are two: one diverging, which propagates forward-in-time, and one converging, which propagates backward-in-time (duality and non-duality together!).
But the negative time energy solution was considered unacceptable, since it implies retrocausality. Werner Heisenberg (German physicist, Nobel Prize 1932) wrote to Wolfgang Pauli: “I regard the backward-in-time solution … as learned trash which no one can take seriously”[3] and in 1926 Erwin Schrödinger (Austrian physicist, Nobel Prize 1933) removed Einstein’s equation from the Klein-Gordon equation which united quantum mechanics with special relativity, suggesting that time be treated in essentially the classical way, as only flowing forward.
In 1928 Paul Dirac (English theoretical physicist Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger) used the energy/momentum/mass equation in order to describe relativistic electrons. He was faced again with a dual solution: electrons (e-) and neg-electrons (e+, the anti-particle of the electron). Heisenberg’s reaction was of outrage, since he perceived the backward-in-time solution as an abomination and in 1934 he replaced those parts of the equation which refer to negative energy, with an operator which creates unlimited numbers of “virtual” electron-positron pairs, without any energy input. In 1934 Heisenberg took this escape window and, since then, physicists ignore the negative energy solutions of the two most used and respected equations in modern physics: the energy/momentum/mass equation of special relativity and Dirac’s relativistic equation.
In 1941, while working on the d’Alembert operator, which combines special relativity and quantum mechanics, the mathematician Luigi Fantappiè[4] realized that the forward-in-time solution (i.e. retarded waves) describes energy and matter that tend towards a homogeneous and random distribution. For example, when heat radiates from a heater, it tends to spread out homogeneously in the environment; this is the law of entropy, which is also known as heat death. Fantappiè showed that the forward-in-time solution is governed by the law of entropy, whereas the backward-in-time solution (i.e. advanced waves) is governed by a symmetric law that Fantappiè named syntropy (from the Greek syn = converging, tropos = tendency).
The forward-in-time solution describes energy that diverges from a cause, and requires that causes be in the past; the backward-in-time solution describes energy that converges towards future causes (i.e. attractors).
The mathematical properties of the law of syntropy are energy concentration, an increase in differentiation and complexity, a reduction of entropy, the formation of structures, and an increase in order. These are also the main properties that biologists observe in life and which cannot be explained in the classical (time forward) way.
This realization led Fantappiè to formulate “The Unitary Theory of the Physical and Biological World,” first published in 1942, where he suggests that we live in a supercausal universe, governed by causality and retrocausality, and that life is caused by the future.[5]
This article is based on Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini’s new book, The Balancing Role of Entropy/Syntropy in Living and Self-Organizing Systems: QUANTUM PARADIGM.
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