Why would we make a film about a concept that hardly anyone has heard of? What is this word Syntropy? And Entropy, yeah, I think I’ve heard of that, but what is it again? Why is it important?

You might’ve had these questions pop up. Here are some answers.

ENTROPY refers to the diverging energy, increasing disorder, and complex systems breaking down into simpler ones. 

SYNTROPY refers to converging energy, increasing order, and simple systems building up into more complex ones.

They are the only two solutions to the most famous scientific equation of our time: ‘the wave/momentum/mass equation’, e=mc² (or at least the lengthened version of this formula = E²=m²c4⁴ + p²c²)

Whilst there’s always been two solutions to this equation, the syntropic one has been ignored because of its radical implications. Why? Because it implies that time is going backwards, i.e. retrocausal, or ‘effect and then the cause’. And this doesn’t make total sense to our linear-thinking brains. For many it takes something of a ‘non-scientific’ leap of faith to surrender to the thought that we are being pulled into the future, humbly bound up in some universal converging flow. Considering that Albert Einstein, Richard Feynam, and Stephen Hawking have all made contributions to the understanding of time-as-illusion or the universe as ‘timeless’, it is surprising that there isn’t more openness to an explanation of time that is different to the linear ‘entropic’ model we are familiar with (Rigden 2006). 

Entropy is the positive ‘forward-in-time’ solution - which implies linear time moving in a causal way - i.e. cause and effect. It is well known in thermodynamics - the study of heat death - and applied widely in our mechanical systems. Yet there’s been nothing from physics which can describe the behaviour of energy in life systems; i.e. we haven’t had a scientific way to grasp the miracle that is Life. As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi has stated ‘the law of entropy does not govern living systems’ (Vannini & Di Corpo, Syntropy: The Spirit of Love, 2015).

Luigi Fantappie has no doubts about when that leap of faith occurred for him and when he ‘discovered the law of syntropy’. It was in the days just before Christmas in 1941 when he was hanging out with two friends, a physicist and a biologist. Walking along afterwards, he was: projected into a new panorama which radically changed the vision of Science and the Universe that I had inherited from my teachers... It suddenly seemed as if the sky were falling apart, or at least the certainties on which mechanical science had based its assumptions. It appeared to me clear that these ‘syntropic’, finalistic phenomena which lead to differentiation and could not be reproduced in a laboratory, were real, and existed in nature, as I could recognize them in the living systems. The properties of this new law opened consequences which were just incredible and which could deeply change the biological, medical, psychological, and social sciences.

Fantappie defined two characteristics of syntropic systems: 

1. Living things are ‘attracted' towards a ‘cause’ in the future. 

2. This cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.*

The second characteristic has already been challenged, with promising experimental evidence indicating syntropy conducted by neuroscientist Dr Antonella Vannini alongside her sociologist husband Ulisse di Corpo. Vannini’s 2007 study measured heart rate and skin conductance observing pre-stimuli interactions amongst participants who were randomly shown evocative stimuli. 

It can be a beguiling concept; that somehow all living things are pulled towards something that will happen in the future. Yet when we look at Nature, it seems to make sense right? Nature undeniably seems to know what it is doing. Out of disorder, order emerges. Amidst the most confusing amass of plants, complex, functional, emergent interrelationships are occuring. The prolific paleontologist Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin tells it like this:
‘Reduced to its essence, the problem of life can be expressed as follows: once we admit the two major Laws of Energy Conservation and of Entropy (to which physics is limited), how can we add, without contradictions, a third universal law (which is expressed by biology) ... The situation is clarified when we consider at the basis of cosmology the existence of a second kind of entropy (or anti-entropy).’ 

One way of thinking of the relationship is that entropy is the ‘push’ force, and syntropy is the ‘pull’ force, and that the two are the universal complementary behaviours of energy in time-space. We are being pushed by the past and pulled by the future. I like to think of it as the Western version of the Yin-Yang (tajitsu) symbol. It’s not that one is better than the other - they are both interdependent upon each other. The health of a system is determined by how well it recycles its energy (entropy) to be used again in growth (syntropy). This is why the torus image - found throughout cosmos, nature, ancient and sacred geometry - is such a good visual explanation of the syntropy-entropy model.

 


Many mathematicians and physicists have acknowledged the role of intuition in the creative progress of science: 

Scientists have a lot in common with artists and poets. Logic and analytical thinking are necessary attributes of the scientist, but are not sufficient for a creative work. In science intuitions which have led to progress are not logically derived from pre-existing knowledge: creative processes on which the progress of science is based operate at an unconscious level. - Leo Sziland

Much of our cultural wisdom orbits around the least tangible or nameable concepts, which we approximate with words such as life-force, flow, calling, energy, resonance, synchronicity. Is the ‘pull’ of syntropy a scientific and physical explanation of these concepts? What doorways does it open up? 

• A dog knows its owner is coming home before they do. (Rupert Sheldrake 1999)
• Heart-rates quicken before stimuli occurs. (Vannini 2011)
• Gut instinct preventing illness (Larry Dossey 2009, The Power of Premonition)
• Dr Joe Dispenza popularises the application of quantum physics of feeling the future and launches the ‘biosyntropy’ product line https://biosyntropy.com/ (2019)
• A seed grows towards the sun without ever having seen it.
• You look to your phone before it rings, and you know who is calling.

It gets really dizzying when you apply the law of syntropy to other stuff, not least: the Big Bang, consciousness, ‘psy’ phenomena, economy, time, and of course, love. Just to name a few! 

Feeling the Future

Ulisse di Corpo is a sociologist and statistician who has probably done the most work in today’s era developing the implications of Fantappie’s mathematical solution. His research with his wife Antonella Vannini has been able to prove the existence of pre-stimuli interactions: that is, increases in heart rate and skin conductance before participants were shown random stimuli. (di Corpo & Vannini 2010)  One of di Corpo’s main points is that this universal converging force is felt in humans as love and that syntropic time-space is something we access through feeling. This is because information flows from the past to the future (entropically) but not from the future to the present (syntropically), so the future can only be sensed through our bodies. Put simply, it is a scientific explanation of the efficacy of embodiment, premonitions, intuition and emotions. The big piece here is that converging energy must converge at some point. So there is a final ‘cause’ in the future which is attracting all of us - the point of complete unification, oneness and love. 

Understandably ‘syntropy’ has been a bit tricky for the scientific world. Perhaps this helps explain why, 80 years on, Fantappie’s name is not as famous as Einstein’s. Has the scientific and mainstream world opened up since then? Can we adopt this language and understanding for a more accurate understanding of the forces of the universe? What does it mean to integrate both entropy and syntropy into our lives, instead of just one of them? Through the insights of the syntropy-entropy model, can we flow with these cycles of Life to greater effect? Make sure to follow our journey, because we will be interviewing people who can use the language of syntropy-entropy to really explain this kind of phenomena.