A 'Theory of Infantile Dynamics' uses the laws of thermodynamics to explain why babies are so effective at creating chaos.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
A Preliminary Theory of Infantile Dynamics
arXiv · 2603.29312
The Takeaway
This paper treats a baby's ability to destroy a clean room as a legitimate system of physics, comparing infants to a 'Maxwell's Demon' that maximizes disorder. It argues that a child's drive for novelty creates a natural growth of entropy (messiness) that inevitably overcomes a parent's attempt to keep things organized.
From the abstract
We present a concise dynamical picture of infant-driven household chaos. The framework has three postulations: recurrent daily chaos, overall entropy growth in household organization, and transient local ordering episodes with switching rules (a volatile Maxwell-demon effect). We illustrate entropy growth with a two-region toy model (organizer vs. play area), where entropy production is nonnegative and long-time behavior is typically play-area dominated. We also model toy diffusion and curiosity