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Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to detail his thoughts on the origins 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;[28] however, it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916.[29] One motivation for writing this theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory which claimed that there was "reserve energy" that could be used by people when put under extreme conditions, Sidis' own "forced prodigy" upbringing being a result of testing said theory. The work is one of the few works that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym.
In The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis states that the universe is infinite, as well as it containing sections of "negative tendencies" where[30] various laws of physics were reversed that are juxtaposed with "positive tendencies", which switch over epochs of time. Sidis states that there was not an "origin of life", but that life has always existed and that it has only changed through evolution. Sidis also adopts Eduard Pflüger's cyanogen based life theory, and Sidis cites "organic" things such as almonds (his example) that have cyanogen that doesn't kill, as cyanogen (and derivatives thereof) is normally a highly toxic substance thus making this a strange anomaly. Sidis describes his theory as a fusion of the mechanistic model of life and the vitalist model of life, as well as entertaining the notion of life coming to earth from asteroids (as advanced by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz). Sidis also states that functionally speaking, stars are "alive" and undergo an eternally repeating light-dark cycle, reversing the second law in the dark portion of the cycle.[31]
For all intents and purposes, Sidis' theory at the time of its release was ignored,[17] only to be found in an attic in 1979. Upon this discovery, Buckminster Fuller (who was a classmate of William James Sidis) said the following in regards to The Animate and the Inanimate:[32]
Imagine my excitement and joy on being handed this xerox of Sidis' 1925 book, in which he clearly predicts the black hole. In fact, I find his whole book, The Animate and the Inanimate to be a fine cosmological piece. I find him focusing on the same subjects that fascinate me, and coming to about the same conclusions as those I have published in SYNERGETICS, and will be publishing in SYNERGETICS Volume II, which has already gone to the press.
As a Harvard man of a generation later, I hope you will become as excited as I am at this discovery that Sidis did go on after college to do the most magnificent thinking and writing."
— Buckminster Fuller
