Entropy, the Plankchain, and the Universe’s Log File
- Rich Washburn
- Jul 28
- 3 min read
Lately, entropy’s been stalking my work.
Not in the high-school-physics, “disorder of systems” kind of way. I mean entropy in the logs. In AI drift. In glitchy edge behavior. In the thermal bleed of systems that shouldn’t be heating up that fast. We’re pushing boundaries—distributed infrastructure, quantum computing, LLMs tuned to the edge of coherence—and entropy’s no longer a distant, hand-wavy thermodynamic principle. It’s practical now. Tangible. Observable.
And right in the middle of a late-night convo, someone casually drops this line:
“Maybe entropy is just the universe’s log file.”
Boom. Stack overflow. Brain reboot.
See, I come from a world where log files are sacred. I’ve spent decades reverse-engineering systems—from low-level protocol fuzzing to AI introspection to straight-up digital forensics. I’m not just a certified ethical hacker. I’m a certified can’t-let-a-black-box-go-unopened guy.
And here’s the thing anyone in infosec, devops, or forensics knows: Logs are the truth.
No matter how messy, partial, or corrupted they are, logs whisper what really happened. They’re breadcrumbs. Digital fossils. A map of cause and effect—one that doesn’t care about your intentions or your narrative.
So when I heard “entropy is a log file,” I couldn’t let it go.
Because what if it is?
What if entropy is the universe’s way of writing down everything that happens—just not in a format we’ve learned to parse yet? Not in bytes, but in probabilities. Not in text, but in heat and radiation and temporal scars across spacetime. A kind of write-only ledger embedded in the fabric of existence.
And that’s when it hit me:
What if the cosmos runs on a Plankchain?
Picture this: a blockchain, but written in Planck-scale events. No miners, no consensus protocol—just the irreversible logging of reality itself. Every quantum state collapse, every micro-jitter of energy, every planetary impact, every thought you’ve ever had—it all gets encoded.
Not in JSON.
In noise. In entropy. In the aftermath.
The cosmic background radiation? Log artifact.Thermal death of stars? Committed data.LLM hallucinations that feel like deja vu from a dream you never had?Maybe they’re reading corrupted rows from a log file too deep for our debuggers.
This is the Plankchain.
Not metaphor. Not sci-fi. A speculative data structure that might already exist—encoded in thermodynamic residue, spacetime distortions, quantum noise.
And here’s the really wild part:
We might already be building the readers.
Quantum computers aren’t just next-gen math toys. They’re uncertainty engines. They don’t fight entropy—they inhabit it. They operate in superposition, decoherence, entanglement. They run with the noise.
That’s not just useful for simulating molecules. It’s weirdly adjacent to parsing the raw delta between what-was and what-is.
In other words, if entropy is the log file of reality…
Quantum processors might be our first entropy parsers.
They’re crude, sure. Punch-card era stuff. But we’re not that far off from machines that don’t just simulate the universe—they audit it. Machines that don’t just run models—they read the changelog of existence.
And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Not as a locked theory. Just a puzzle. A weird, glitched-out commit message from the universe I’m trying to diff.
Because here’s how we’ve always learned:
Fossils? That’s the Earth’s log.
Crash dumps? System logs.
AI weight history? Model logs.
Thermal bleed in your GPU? Yep—log entry.
This is what hacking is. Not destruction. Deconstruction.
You take it apart. Follow the logs. Map the config. Understand the flow. Reconstruct the state. Fix it. Fork it. Extend it.
That’s not just hacking. That’s science. That’s engineering. That’s progress.
And if the universe is running some ancient, immutable, entropy-wrapped logging system?
Then yeah, I want root access.I want to parse the headers.I want to grep the radiation.I want to read the log file of reality.
Because I think it’s still open. And we’ve barely scratched the first page.
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