Leer en español: La Ley Universal de la Dirección: un principio de filosofía natural que rige el orden y el desorden (artículo de investigación)
Amelie Renee McCoy
Independent researcher, Natural Physics Press
contact@naturalphysics.org | naturalphysics.org
October 2026
Cite as: McCoy, A. R. (2026). The Governing Interaction of Direction: A Natural-Philosophical Principle of Order and Disorder. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23352474
PDF version: available on Zenodo (same link).
Abstract
This paper sets out the Governing Interaction of Direction, a principle of natural philosophy reasoned qualitatively from first principles: every attraction and repulsion, including the random, flows along the path of greatest attraction and/or least repulsion. Treated this way, attraction and repulsion are the basic interactions of nature, not simply metaphors for human likes and dislikes. Order and disorder become two outcomes of one rule of movement. Spencer’s line of least resistance and James’s path of least resistance are early forerunners of the Governing Interaction of Direction. Its relation to the Second Law of Thermodynamics is also addressed. The paper is drawn from the author’s book Understanding Attraction, Repulsion, Repetition, and Change, Vol. 1 (McCoy, 2026). This most recent version of the paper upgrades the Universal Law of Direction to the Governing Interaction of Direction.
Keywords: natural philosophy; governing interactions; first principles; direction; attraction and repulsion; order and disorder; entropy; habit
Introduction
Most laws of nature describe what happens once things are already defined: objects first, motion second, forces last. This paper reverses that order. Here, force comes first, direction second, object third: recurring repetition as momentum directs motion.
Natural philosophy has long called its fundamental statements laws, and that carried over into science. The word fits poorly for two reasons. First, laws describe nature; they do not rule it. Second, a law implies a lawgiver and a command to obey, but nature obeys no one; its own interactions govern its motion, hence the term governing interaction. This most recent version of the paper upgrades the Universal Law of Direction to the Governing Interaction of Direction. The word law is kept for the work of others and for history, from the laws of nature of Spinoza, Descartes, and Newton to Spencer’s line of least resistance and James’s path of least resistance.
The work belongs to natural philosophy in the older sense, the tradition of Spinoza, Descartes, and Newton: reasoning qualitatively from first principles about what we perceive and how nature works. It does not replace measurement, experimentation, or established mathematical formalisms. It steps back from specialization to ask a question those tools take for granted: why does anything go one way rather than another?
The Governing Interaction of Direction
(GI 4) Every attraction and repulsion, including the random,
flows along the path of greatest attraction
and/or least repulsion.
Each operative attraction and repulsion is about something, and so carries a direction, singly or by group. That direction is the greatest attraction and/or least repulsion among the available directions, or another direction would replace it. And indeed, that happens where greater attractions and/or lesser repulsions appear. A random direction is no exception; it too is the direction of greatest attraction and/or least repulsion. Attractions and repulsions rarely act alone: many act at once, and the path actually taken is what remains when they are combined.
Where acceleration is zero and momentum is directionless, alternatives remain where they are operative, and those attractions and/or repulsions determine the direction in which anything moves. In computer code, random numbers don’t have attractions and repulsions, but the person who wrote the particular random number algorithm chose one method over another.
The Governing Interaction of Direction also states what cannot happen:
A force or momentum can’t move against its cause.
Only a new or fresh cause can affect a prior cause.
Terms
Attraction is a subtraction from a medium: what subtracts and draws together by degree. Repulsion is a concentration: what concentrates and pushes away. Both are used inclusively, as nouns that make up objects, as subject matter, and as directional motion.
Resistance is not a separate fundamental; it is a derivative of repulsion, the passive presentation of repulsion to something, as in friction.
The actual, not the ideal
The path of greatest attraction and/or least repulsion should not be confused with an ideal or imagined choice. Imagination lets us rationalize and idealize attractions and repulsions without acting on them. Reality often requires compromise. The compromise actually put into motion expresses the greatest operative attraction and/or least repulsion.
When motion occurs
Two companion governing interactions state when the Governing Interaction of Direction comes into play:
The Governing Interaction of Equality
(GI 5) Where [when] attractions and/or repulsions
oppose each other equally, there is
no relative motion.
The Governing Interaction of Inequality
(GI 6) Where [when] attractions and/or repulsions
do not oppose each other equally,
there is relative motion.
Equality and Inequality answer whether something moves. Direction answers which way.
Antecedents: Lines and Paths of Least Resistance
Herbert Spencer cast a version of it as a law of motion in First Principles (1862): motion follows the line of least resistance. William James carried it into psychology in The Principles of Psychology (1890) as the path of least resistance, describing habit and mental effort, and bridged passivity and activity through intervening will.
The Governing Interaction of Direction differs from both in three respects. First, it applies to all of nature. Second, it names attraction as well as repulsion, so it covers motion that leads as well as motion that pushes. Third, it treats resistance as derived rather than fundamental.
A climber shows why this matters. Climbing a mountain looks like nothing but resistance, and moving against gravity is exactly that. Yet the climber climbs, because the act of climbing is more attractive and/or less repulsive than staying home. The climber still moves in the direction the Governing Interaction of Direction describes.
Order and Disorder Under One Rule
The same directional rule describes both order (negentropy) and disorder (entropy). Constructive and destructive processes both move in their directions of greatest attraction and/or least repulsion.
Order. Drop three marbles into a cereal bowl. Gravity moves them downward, and the curve of the bowl guides them to a stable rest at the bottom center. A simple structure forms, not through intention, but through gravity and direction. Repetition then holds the structure in place:
Repetition dictates structure, bounded by details, with little room for deviation.
The same principle scales up. Most crystals, such as diamond and halite, have fixed attractions and repulsions and therefore repeating symmetry orders, causing cleavage breaks along repeating planes. Amorphous mineraloids such as obsidian and hyalite lack repeating boundary conditions and form no such repeating breaks; they fracture along curved, shell-like (conchoidal) surfaces instead.
Disorder. Now picture the bowl falling off the table and shattering. The marbles and fragments scatter: chaos, disarray, entropy. But not without direction. Each fragment travels along the path of least repulsion, the trajectory where nothing pushed back hard enough to stop it. The disorder was not random. It followed the same governing interaction.
When repetitive interactions break, disorder increases, at least until a new interactive order becomes repetitive. Construction and destruction can occur simultaneously: forming one order may require dismantling another. Potters at the potter’s wheel, deforming a clay blob while forming an object, are such an example. Reconstruction does not reverse sequential actions; reconstruction builds the same order, the same design, through new interactions.
Order and disorder are therefore not opposites in the direction of fundamental motion; they are opposites in formation.
Relation to the Second Law of Thermodynamics
The Second Law of Thermodynamics. In an isolated system, energy tends to spread because there are generally more possible microscopic arrangements with energy spread among its parts than concentrated in a few. These more probable states have greater entropy (Clausius, 1865). Jeff Phillips puts the spreading tendency plainly in his TED-Ed lesson What Is Entropy?: “If energy has the opportunity to spread out, it will” (Phillips, 2017). He also discusses the familiar description of entropy as a measure of disorder. That description encourages us to picture entropy as a system’s tendency to spread into disorder.
The Governing Interaction of Direction does not contradict it; it describes which way a given interaction goes. Heat transfers outward: warmer matter passes its energy to the cooler air molecules around it, heating them in turn, and temperature gradients reflect this transfer in interaction with their environment. This governing interaction constrains the paths along which those outcomes unfold.
Schrödinger (1944) describes living organisms as feeding on “negative entropy.” They maintain their order—a state associated with fewer possible microscopic arrangements of their particles and energy—through eating, drinking, and breathing, rather than simply dispersing into states with more possible arrangements of those particles and energy. Schrödinger’s account describes how living order is maintained. The Governing Interaction of Direction describes how the attractions and repulsions involved direct both formation and dispersal.
Natural Selection
The Governing Interaction of Direction reaches into biology without exception. Understanding Attraction, Repulsion, Repetition, and Change, Vol. 1 states it as the Governing Interaction of Natural Selection:
(GI 14) Every selection, including the random, is the
greatest attraction and/or least repulsion.
Natural selection is the generational propagation of heritable characteristics through varying inclusions and exclusions. DNA is a repetitive code in the direction of greatest attraction and least repulsion that dictates what forms and propagates and what does not. Each inclusion and each exclusion is an attraction or a repulsion at work. Living things therefore have no choice but to move with it.
Nature does not decide. Wind does not select which trees will fall. Water does not choose which tree will thrive. Soil does not select its plants; each plant, continually priming for its soil, reacts to the soil it meets. However, nature is not perfect in its repetition. Variations, however small, can and do arise from generation to generation depending on epigenetic interactions.
Antler growth in a human fetus, like antler growth before birth in any species that grows antlers later, would likely kill the mother: sharp tines, or antlers too large for the birth canal, would make her death likely, and a species producing such fetuses could not survive. Natural selection therefore excludes its propagation. Any single death may still occur from any particular cause, whether an inherited variant (however common or rare it has become, including through drift) or an accident, but what is not heritable does not propagate.
Direction in Living and Human Behavior
Because attraction and repulsion are used inclusively, the Governing Interaction of Direction reaches into choice and behavior.
Aggression and redirected attention. One might object: I attack someone because they are repulsive, not attractive. That is true insofar as you have defined them that way, but if attacking someone were more repulsive than attractive, the motion would not happen. Attacking someone has become less repulsive than not attacking; the motive, whether to be seen, read, heard, smelled, or perhaps physically felt, may or may not yet be determined.
When someone claims to have moved against the Governing Interaction of Direction, they have shifted their focus, and that shift is the new attraction or least repulsion. Redirecting attention to revenge, duty, or proving a point becomes more attractive and/or less repulsive than not acting. Naming the target repulsive does not reverse the interaction; it disguises the attraction or least repulsion behind the action.
Uncommitted attractions and repulsions. Accidents and small choices obey the Governing Interaction of Direction too. In a two-week study in an English supermarket, University of Leicester psychologists played French or German music above comparable French and German wines. With French accordion music, French wine outsold German wine by about five to one; with German beer-hall music, German wine outsold French by about two to one. Few shoppers were aware the music played any role (North, Hargreaves, & McKendrick, 1997; reported in National Geographic, May 1998). Without commitment to a specific product, buyers had no fixed direction of attraction. The music supplied one.
Scope and Limits
The Governing Interaction of Direction predicts:
- where motion will occur, given the greater and lesser attractions and repulsions present;
- how order can arise without design;
- why disorder disperses along particular paths rather than at random;
- why nothing moves against its own motion while conditions remain unchanged.
Rates and frequencies of attractions and repulsions, how fast and how often, are developed in the companion volume, Understanding Attraction, Repulsion, Repetition, and Change, Vol. 2.
What this is not. This work is not a reinterpretation of thermodynamics, a challenge to conservation laws, a metaphysical “law of attraction,” or a proposal of new forces, constants, or particles. It does not rely on purpose, intention, or teleology, and it is not probabilistic, symbolic, or metaphorical. It describes how the forces of attraction, repulsion and their momentums direct motion, wherever attraction and repulsion operate.
Conclusion
Order and disorder, structure and dispersion, habit and choice follow one rule: the Governing Interaction of Direction. Established laws operate unchanged on top of it. What it offers is a single answer to the oldest question about motion: which way, and why that way?
Note on AI Assistance
The laws, definitions, examples, and arguments in this paper are the author’s own and are taken from Understanding Attraction, Repulsion, Repetition, and Change: Their Governing Interactions in Nature, for Parents and Students, Vol. 1 (Edition 2.0) and the author’s earlier drafts. This paper was assembled and edited with the assistance of an AI writing tool (Claude, by Anthropic) under the author’s direction, for wording, structure, and the reference list, and was then revised by the author word by word and sentence by sentence, where it appeared necessary. The author is responsible for its content.
References
Clausius, R. (1865). Über verschiedene für die Anwendung bequeme Formen der Hauptgleichungen der mechanischen Wärmetheorie. Annalen der Physik, 125(7), 353–400.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
McCoy, A. R. (2026). Understanding Attraction, Repulsion, Repetition, and Change: Their Governing Interactions in Nature, for Parents and Students, Vol. 1 (Edition 2.0). Natural Physics Press, naturalphysics.org. Available at https://ameliestudios.com/b/p3kWB
North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & McKendrick, J. (1997). In-store music affects product choice. Nature, 390, 132.
Phillips, J. (2017). What Is Entropy? TED-Ed. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-is-entropy-jeff-phillips
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spencer, H. (1862). First Principles. London: Williams and Norgate.
Read the book chapter this paper is drawn from: The Governing Interaction of Direction (book excerpt).
Get the book: Understanding Attraction, Repulsion, Repetition, and Change: Their Governing Interactions in Nature, for Parents and Students, Vol. 1.