Animate and the Inanimate
by William James Sidis
About this book
Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to elaborate his thoughts on the origin of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's Demon, among other things. It was published in 1925, but it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. One motivation for the theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory, which proposed that people subjected to extreme conditions could use "reserve energy". Sidis' own "forced prodigy" upbringing was a result of testing the theory. The work is one of the few that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym. - Summary by Wikipedia
Chapters (18)
1I. The Reverse Universe
2II. Reversible Laws
3III. Irreversibility
4IV. The Paradox
5V. The Probabilities in the Problem
6VI. Solution of the Paradox
7VII. Theories of Life
8VIII. The Extension of the Second Law
9IX. The Relation Between the Tendencies
10X. Exothermic and Endothermic Substances
11XI. Theories of the Origin of Life
12XII. The Astronomical Universe
13XIII. The Nebular Hypothesis
14XIV. The Reversibility Theory of Cosmogony
15XV. The Pseudo-Living Organisms
16XVI. Psychological Aspect of Reversal
17XVII. General Summary of the Theory
18XVIII. Some Objections to the Reversibility Theory. XIX. Conclusion
Comments