This Project Has Moved

Epiphysics — the full theory, applications, research, and experimental program — now lives at:

Source code: github.com/ianderrington/epiphysics

The project includes:

Theory (Epimechanics) — the formal framework: representations, entities, mass, force, energy, coupling, thermodynamics, the Representational Efficiency principle
Applications — efficiency limits for organizations, robustness metrics, future cost of decisions, decision theory
Research — the Representational Efficiency paper, rate-distortion → Lagrangian proof, experimental protocols
Experiments — planned empirical tests (Lagrangian vs neural ODE, conservation law discovery, perturbative hierarchy)

The Core Insight

All representations have mechanical structure — that's just calculus. Good representations have simple mechanical structure — simple enough to predict dynamics at minimal computational cost. The existence of an optimal representation is a theorem (Shannon, Rissanen, Solomonoff). That the optimal representation has Lagrangian structure is the conjecture the project investigates.

Popular Introductions

For accessible introductions to the ideas, see the Physics of Common Sense series:

Why the Best Description Wins — the compression theorem
Why Your Desk Gets Messy — entropy and free energy
Why Habits Are Hard to Break — generalized mass and stability basins
Why Your House Costs More Than You Think — mass ≠ maintenance cost