The Animate and the Inanimate

by William James Sidis

What is fascinating about this book is that the deep amount of theory contained, a sort of theory of everything attempting to integrate the second law, with the nebular hypothesis, and evolution, among other phenomenon such as "black body stars" (black holes) as he called them, the "big collision" (big bang) theory of the origin of the universe, etc., was conceived in 1915-1916 as a sort of passing hobby by a seventeen-year-old child prodigy during his summer off who had just finished a mathematics degree at Harvard and was on his way to Law School at Cambridge. To give a decent representative quote: "Our theory of the origin of life is that there is no origin, but only a constant development and change of form." He mixes this in with discussions of endothermic and exothermic movements of matter in relation to animate matter (humans) and inanimate matter (food), into and out of the body, in way that seems to foreshadow the concept of free energy coupling developed in the 1920s through the 1940s, all in relation to chemical experiments and findings, such as the Haber process.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Physics, Nonfiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

William James Sidis (April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy born to Jewish emigrants from Ukraine with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He is notable for his 1920 book The Animate and the Inanimate, in which he postulates the existence of dark matter, entropy and the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.

Sidis was raised in a particular manner by his father, psychologist Boris Sidis and mother, Sarah (Mandelbaum) Sidis, M.D., wished heir son to be gifted and believed in nurturing in him a precocious and fearless love of knowledge.

Sidis could read The New York Times at 18 months. By age 8, he had reportedly taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) and invented another, which he called "Vendergood".

He entered Harvard at age 11 (graduating by 16) and, as an adult, was claimed to have an extremely high IQ (250-300, unconfirmed), and to be conversant in about 25 languages and dialects. Some of these claims have not been verifiable, but peers such as Norbert Wiener supported the assertion that his intelligence was very high.

Although the University had previously refused to let his father enroll him at age 9 because he was still a child, Sidis set a record in 1909 by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard University. In early 1910, Sidis' mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies. Notable child prodigy, cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, who also attended Harvard at the time and knew Sidis later stated in his book Ex-Prodigy: "The talk would have done credit to a first or second-year graduate student of any age...talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very brilliant child."
MIT Physics professor Daniel F. Comstock was full of praises. ‘His method of thinking is real intellect. He doesn't cram his head with facts. He reasons. "Gauss is the only example in history, of all prodigies, whom Sidis resembles". Further stating that Sidis would become the leading mathematician and a leader in that science in future.

Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, on June 18, 1914, at age 16.

According to The Prodigy: a Biography of William James Sidis, he briefly served at the League of Nations before leaving because U.S. president Woodrow Wilson would not withdraw troops deployed during the Great War. He was outspoken about his pacifism.

From writings on cosmology, to writings on American Indian history, to Notes on the Collection of Transfers, and several purported lost texts on anthropology, philology, and transportation systems, Sidis covered a broad range of subjects. Some of his ideas concerned cosmological reversibility and "social continuity".

In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operated in reverse to the temporal direction that we experience in our local area. Everything outside of what we would today call a galaxy would be such a region. Sidis claimed that the matter in this region would not generate light. Sidis's The Tribes and the States (ca. 1935) employs the pseudonym "John W. Shattuck", purporting to give a 100,000-year history of the Settlement of the Americas, from prehistoric times to 1828. In this text, he suggests that "there were red men at one time in Europe as well as in America".

Sidis was also a "peridromophile", a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers under the pseudonym of "Frank Folupa" that identified means of increasing public transport usage.

In 1930, Sidis received a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that took into account leap years.

Reviews

[Victor Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harvard child prodigy William James Sidis writes at young age a dissertation about the balance (presented here as an hypothesis of reversibility) of the universe. Sidis’ discourse builds on his contemporary physics, it is in line with Einstein's cosmological constant, and preludes Hawking’s Black Holes and modern-day dark matter, dark energy and string theories. If you are interested in philosophy, you may also see in his work an attempt to reconcile physical cosmology with oriental Taoist yin-yang or Hindu breathing universe, while it sets apart from western Aristotelian conceptions, although Immanuel Kant is the only direct reference to philosophy in the text. Even though it lacks of a particular scientific formulation or empirical backup beyond the combination of existing knowledge and personal insights, I find this reading compelling, gripping, and definitely recommendable for those interested in the study of the universe that cannot be observed in space-time.

[Matt McClure · Rating 2 out of 5]

Suggesting that The Animate and Inanimate adumbrates the discovery of dark matter and black holes is unfounded. Such a claim is akin to concluding Simon Newcomb to be the first to propose the presence of dark energy in his The Extent of the Universe merely because he did not know if photons "extinguished" during space travel.

The structure of The Animate and Inanimate is ordinate, containing well-written chapters written by a Harvard-class teenager who suggests in both the introduction and the conclusion that he is merely "thinking out loud." The book begins with an axiom, after which Sidis assembles all the tools deemed necessary to generate a grand theory of the universe.

The metaphysics expounded in this book serves as an explanation for the existence of William James' "reserve energy," outlined in The Energies of Men. Sidis' axiom is that reserve energy exists. Sidis does not question if reserve energy exists but rather how. According to Sidis, reserve energy invalidates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of the universe is irreversibly increasing, and so he investigates how this is possible.

From the postulate that every physical law in the universe is reversible (pg. 49), Sidis hypothesizes that a "negative universe" (or "reverse" or "dark" universe) exists in conjunction with our universe. These universes comprise both positive sections and negative sections and share energy with each other – upholding the conservation of energy – and fit together equally, like concentric drums. In the reverse universe, the physical laws are reversed (e.g., in classical mechanics, spilled milk would collect itself and travel back inside a glass). There is no origin of either universe; the cosmos coexist perpetually in changing form.

Positive sections of the universe emit light and represent the physically observable sections of our universe ( i.e. , the Milky Way). Negative bricks absorb light, creating unobservable "dark" sections of the universe (i.e., the reverse universe). Sidis suggests that there is a tug-of-war between our universe and the dark universe, wherein there exists a constant fluctuation of energy belonging both to the positive sections and to the negative sections of the universe. In this manner, "pseudo-living creatures" in the reverse universe share energy with living creatures of our universe. This shared energy in the reverse universe is the ebb-and-flow origin of reserve energy of mankind in our universe.

Sidis' metaphysics is quite interesting, and it is easy to appreciate the similarities between it and the eastern philosophical concept of yin and yang. However, Sidis' "dark" sections of the universe are unlike dark matter in that dark matter does not absorb any light whatsoever. Sidis' view of an infinite universe is supported by theories expounded by William Herschel, where Sidis considers the area outside of the Milky Way (our "universe") to be a distant, invisible (or "dark") universe. He mistakes extragalactic phenomena for separate universes. Sidis also claims the aether is the stuff that fills the universe, even though this was debunked experimentally by Michelson and Morley in 1887 and theoretically by Einstein in the decades following, well before the publication of this book.

Sidis' work includes no findings in modern physics at the time (viz., statistical mechanics, Bohr quantum mechanics, or the principle of relativity – nothing from Poincare, Lorentz, or Einstein), but similarities in his metaphysics can be drawn to certain concepts in our time, such as dark energy; nevertheless, they are not even close equivalents. Instead, Sidis' views have more in common with Walter Russell's than, say, Penrose's. This book is very interesting and easy to read, and it is oftentimes fun to imagine the veracity of its propositions and conclusions. Nevertheless, Sidis started on a false premise: the existence of reserve energy. Even though his mathematical prowess was evidently monumental (according to Wiener's biography), which is in no way demonstrated here, his understanding of fundamental physics was limited; there is no mathematics in this book, save for a couple of simple expressions. Sidis did not predict dark matter, and he did not theorize the existence of black holes.

The Animate and Inanimate is a fun read, but don't take it too seriously and try not to read too much into it.

[Ivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Gilles Deleuze, this book represents the wandering of a brilliant, but ignorant mind, thoroughly unequipped with the instruments to test the conjectures of cosmology, experimental biology and physics, which it creates. Reading it now in 2021, invokes a profound sense of loss and unease due to how this mind - William James Sidis was treated by the society and how his very upbringing and local environment prevented him from acquiring those necessary tools, not in the least because of a "tiger" family, which in other circumstance might have been qualified as "privileged".

What a colossal waste, and seeing what we do with our children, in the absence of outside intervention I'm certain this colossal waste continues to the day, if only for the saving power of the internet, which is, in itself not free of distractions and false paths to obscurantism under the guise of enlightenment.

[Jovany Agathe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating about this book is that the deep amount of theory contained, a sort of theory of everything attempting to integrate the second law, with the nebular hypothesis, and evolution, among other phenomenon such as "black body stars" (black holes) as he called them, the "big collision" (big bang) theory of the origin of the universe, etc., was conceived in 1915-1916 as a sort of passing hobby by a seventeen-year-old child prodigy during his summer off who had just finished a mathematics degree at Harvard and was on his way to Law School at Cambridge. To give a decent representative quote: "Our theory of the origin of life is that there is no origin, but only a constant development and change of form." He mixes this in with discussions of endothermic and exothermic movements of matter in relation to animate matter (humans) and inanimate matter (food), into and out of the body, in way that seems to foreshadow the concept of free energy coupling developed in the 1920s through the 1940s, all in relation to chemical experiments and findings, such as the Haber process.

[Berktuğ · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Daha önce de söylediğimiz gibi, sıfır olasılık, yalnızca aşırı bir olasılıksızlıktır, ancak zorunlu olarak bir imkansızlık değildir."

İçerik değeri yüksek kitaplar zaten her okurun peşinde koştuğu bir şeyken, bir de koleksiyon değeri yüksek kitaplar vardır. Bu değer belirli ölçütlerde objektif bir hal alabildiği gibi sizin gözünüzde tıpkı bu objektif hal ile aynı derecede yüksek bir değer kriteri varsa subjektif biçimde de kendini gösterebilir. William James Sidis'in altına kendi adını yazmaya değer gördüğü tek eser olan "Canlı ve Cansız" ise koleksiyon değeri bakımından tarafımdan zaten en yüksek puanı almasına rağmen içeriğinin de bu değerden uzak kalmaması, onu gözümde çok ama çok önemli bir kitap yapmaya fazlasıyla yetti.

William James Sidis'in popüler olan tarafından başlayalım. Gezegenin gördüğü "kayıtlara geçmiş" en zeki insanın zekasının limiti konusunda bazı spekülasyonlar olmasına rağmen 16 yaşında Harvard mezunu ve 8 dil bilen biri olması en azından nöronlarının değeri konusunda bize bir alt limit gösteriyor. Bu görkemli CV'yi bir kenara attığımızda ortada kendi açımdan fazlasıyla yakın bulduğum bir trajedi ile başbaşa kalıyoruz. "Failed Genius" olarak ilan edilmiş bir hayat. Sanki içine doğduğu insanlığa bir şey borçluymuşçasına.

Gezegenin "kayıtlara geçmiş" en zeki insanının gezegene 1898 yılında doğmasının ne tür bir şanssızlık olduğu bir yana, aynı donanım ile sadece bir jenerasyon daha geç doğsa eline geçeceği imkanlar ile yapabilecekleri asla bilemeyeceğimiz müthiş bir potansiyel olduğu için üzücü biçimde bir hayal kırıklığına dönüşüyor. Tüm bunların yanında zekasını fark etme kapasitesine sahip kontrolcü bir aile ise hayal kırıklığının dozunu artırıyor tabi. 9 yaşında 8 dil bilen bir dahi ne kadar etkileyici olsa da, ona bu imkanı sağlayabilecek bir aile kağıtta gözüktüğü kadar bir şans olmuyor kendisi için. En azından duygusal yeterlilik sağlasın diye 11 yaşında üniversiteye başlayan Sidis'in zekasının dil ve matematiğe yatkın olması ise onu idolleştirmemi sağlayan bir başka etken oluyor kendi açımdan. Sidis'in hayatının mezun olduktan sonrası ise "dahi baskısının" olumsuz etkilerinin çokta şaşırtıcı olmayan sonuçları ile başbaşa bırakıyor denklemin sonunda bizleri. Kendisinin en sevdiğim sözü ise yazdıklarından değil samimi bir röportajdan çıkıyor;

"Mükemmel bir hayat yaşamanın tek yolu, onu inzivada yaşamaktır."

Tam da içine doğduğu gezegen konusunda hayal kırıklığına uğramış birinin ağzından çıkabilecek bir söz. Bu çok ama çok ilginç hayatı bir kenara bırakıp bunun bir kitap yorumu olduğu gerçeğine tekrar döndüğüm vakit, kitabın değerinin üstüne eklediği kısımlara geliyoruz.

Sidis 1925'te yazdığı ama 1916'dan beri konuya çalıştığı söylenen bu kitapta kendi ağzıyla bile "spekülatif" olarak tanımladığı, basit görünümüne rağmen müthiş biçimde yaratıcı olan bir düşünce deneyini ve bunun sonuçlarını yine kendisiyle tartışıyor. İskelet olarak termodinamiğin 2.yasasını alan anlatı, "bizim evrenimizin tam zıttı bir ters evren" hayal ederek oranın fizik kurallarını oluşturuyor ve kozmoloji açısından son derece değerli ve başarılı bir teori ortaya çıkartıyor. Her fizik kuralı matematiksel biçimde tersine dönerken "entropy" nin dönemeyeceğini savunarak başlayan Sidis bunun bu ters evreni nasıl şekillendirdiğini ve sırf böyle bir durumun "olma olasılığı olduğu" için bunun sonuçlarının evrenimizde de yansıması gerektiğine varıyor. Şaşırtıcı olan ise tüm bu durum, 1925 yılında yazılmış harflerin arasında adı konulmamış bir biçimde 1971'de keşfedilecek kara delikleri okumamızı sağlıyor.

Kitabın sarsıcı yanı bu. Çıktığı vakit tabiri caizse "iplenmeyen" ve belki de sırf bu yüzden yılgın dahimizin "tramvaylar" ve "antropolojik tarih" gibi konular ile uğraşmasına ve insanlığı tamamen terk etmesine yol açan kitap belki de insanlık tarihini değiştiriyor. Sidis'in ters evreninin resmiyet kazandığı 1925 yılı astronomi açısından inanılmaz bir zaman dilimi. Birkaç yıl sonra keşfedilecek "antimadde" ve fizik yasalarımızda devrim yaratacak "kuantum mekaniği" tam da Sidis'in bu kitaptaki hayallerine uygun ve kalemini eline aldıracak buluşlar olmasına rağmen fizik bilimi bu kitaptan sonra çok değerli bir üyesinden mahrum kalıyor. Sidis bundan sonra büyük ihtimalle astronomi ve daha da genel biçimde fizik ile ilgilenmemiş olacak ki sadece sahte ad ile yazdığı bir tarih kitabına denk geliyoruz bu yıllardan sonra. Zaten çok geçmeden de 1944 yılında dünyayı biyolojik açıdan terk ediyor yılgın dahimiz.

"Canlı ve Cansız" adlı kitabın sadece Sidis bu dünyaya bir şey bırakmış olsun diye yazılmış olduğu ve altına ismini yazdıktan sonra bir daha asla istemediği bir şeyi yapmayacağına yemin eden bir adam yaratmış olabileceği ihtimalleri de mevcut. İroninin gezegendeki her köşede varlığını hissettirmesine uygun biçimde bizim kitabı okuyabilmemiz ise 1979'da bir tavan arasında keşfedilmesiyle yaşanıyor. Tabi kara delikleri de içeren bir evren teorisi 1925'in aksine daha kabul edilebilir kalıyor 60 sene sonra.

Kitabın olumlu noktaları kendini fazlasıyla kanıtladığı için yanlışlanmış biyoloji teorilerini göz ardı edebilmek mümkün. Ki yine yanlışken bile savunduklarını belirli dayanaklara ve güçlü sebeplere dayandırabilen bir Sidis var kitapta. Ben bu tarafları olumsuz olarak nitelendirmek yerine onun kurduğu teori temellerinden nasıl daha farklı bir sonuca çıkılır şeklinde bir okuma gerçekleştirdim. Zaten içindekilerin "spekülatif" olduğunu belirten bir adamın düşünce deneyinde niye yanlışlanabilir varsayımlar içeriyor diye 100 sene gelecekten sorgulamak bariz bir biçimde yanlış olurdu.

Kitabı okumak için temel bir fizik bilgisi ve biraz da konuya yatkınlık gerektiği açık. Ancak teorik fizik üzerine bir düşünce deneyi okumak için lise üstü bir eğitime ihtiyacınız da yok. "Canlı ve Cansız" alanı ne olursa olsun kendisini bilim adamı olarak tanımlayan kişilere önerebileceğim en sofistike eserlerden biri.

Koleksiyon değerinin yanında kendi evren teorime katkıları, sahte yaşamdan gelen bir yaşam kavramı, imkansızlığın imkanlı olasılığı, Big Bang öncesine dair açılan çok geniş bir düşünce alanı ve son derece ilginç fiziksel ters evreni ile "tembel dahilerin" poster çocuğu ve idolü Sidis'in Canlı ve Cansız adlı eseri çok ama çok iyi bir eser.

"Bu sürecin neden bu şekilde gerçekleşmesi gerektiğini açıklamaya kalkışamam; ancak atomların hem ayrışması hem de entegrasyonu sürekli olarak gerçekleşebilir ve birinin diğerine fazlalığı koşullar altında farklılık gösterebilir."

[JR Blanchfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly written work of enormously informational theories regarding "reverse entropy", among others. GREAT BOOK!

[Kiira · Rating 5 out of 5]

this just gave me an existential crisis the same way that Tenet did

[Glenn E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart guy. The idea is pretty cool overall. It only took me a few dozen times rereading the Preface to get his general idea. The rest of the chapters support his "interesting" postulation. I didn't go to Harvard, and I have the intelligence of a chimp compared to Mr. Sidis, but my buddies and I came up with crazy "fog" minded stuff about Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, et. al., Mr. Sidis just thought way bigger...

I like that Mr. Sidis made me look up a zillion words and forced me to understand Thermodynamics, Lord Kelvin, and a bunch of other crazy esoteric concepts, that ultimately I now understand and usually elude Poly Sci pot heads like me. Mr. Sidis uses Geek language to explain his "postulation'" to a cerebral audience that is used to hearing the speaker begin each phrase with: "Again,..." like the audience needs continual reinforcement as a parent speaks to a child. I get the "language" now though. It makes sense that Mr. Sidis could speak a zillion other languages as well... because he was seeing the "concept" three dimensionally and just explaining it with the words at hand to an audience he thought he needed to validate his assertion.

Ultimately, he says How the Universe works but not Why. He's OK with admitting we're not smart enough to know the "Why", but accepts that we are all tied together. I like Mr. Sidis' view of entropy as "Reserve Energy". I would certainly like to believe Mr. Sidis ideas more than any other ones out there with an ultimately terminal destination .

[Bruno Guerreiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading WJS because he is famously known to have had the highest IQ of all time, speculated to be between 250-300. He wrote this speculative thesis at the age of 27, but he was reading the New York Times at 18 months of age. He was obviously a gifted individual and that created interest in me to dissect his thought process.

In this thesis, he undergoes a very deep thought process on the irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, suggesting at one point it is a mental law rather than a physical one due to how we perceive the flow of time.

Although speculative, I found fascinating how humans have achieved this level of abstractive reasoning. It took me a while to read this book because I was constantly challenged to break down dogmatic assumptions I had. Although you can't really prove what he's claiming, you can't really disprove it either. But for the time this was written (1925), a lot of physical and chemical knowledge we have today was unavailable at the time, so it is amazing how he showed this level of mental acuity.

It's a hard read, and very speculative at times, but he never claims to be the truth, only an hypothesis.

I suggested reading it if you're brave.

[Brandonguadalupe Gandarillaanchondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is where sidis initially shapes his ideas with which he would end up theorizing black holes in some of the letters he wrote at age 20 where he describes "stars that absorb light", of course before getting into a problem about definitions the which we obtain by means of the etymology, it is not possible to separate etymology and definition, it would be like separating numbers from nature and decimals, stars comes from the German steorra which means "to leave a trail in the sky", just what a black hole does with its gravitational weight

[Mark Clackum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by a young Sidis (~20y/o) a century ago, as a brilliant thought-experiment; an exercise in complementarity, Sidis postulates an equal reverse universe where all laws of physics are reversible. In the positive areas ( where we live) , all things tend to increase entropy, which spends the energy into heat, but in the equal volume of negative entropy areas that energy is reclaimed & stored for the positive side to dissapate it once again, moving in different directions of a fixed timeline.

[Giorgio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sometimes, a book is so amazing, the content so "out there", so above your mediocre understanding that you cannot fathom its content...
It is not the case.
The book is just a mess. The theories come from nothing to nowhere.
I think Sidis had an amazing hardware, but the software... damn, it was Windows 8 or something.

[Marcus M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Loved the discussion on time being the fourth dimension, stellar systems, live and inactive life. How it talked about there being a reverse universe and their fixation and explanation on the 2nd law of thermodynamics

[Atrona Grizel (Sov8840)]

Shut up so that humans won't have anything to exploit, so that what comes out of you is not returned as an enemy. Instead of shouting and screaming, remove your need and dependence on outward speaking and external communication, and let the universe in you host an eternal opera special only to you.

[julio padilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

for geniuses

Interesting theory about life, but a bit of background on the subject is what makes the universe more complex than we think

[Celestin Büche · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful mind.

[Aditya Narayanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart dude

[I am infinitely financially wealthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind f*cking blown frrrrrrrr.