The Animate And The Inanimate

Sidis entertains the idea that life originated on Earth from asteroids (as put forth by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz) while describing his theory as a synthesis of the mechanical and vitalist life models. Sidis also claims that stars are "alive" and go through an eternally repeating light-dark cycle, with the second law reversing in the dark portion of the cycle. Sidis' theory was dismissed upon release, only to be discovered in an attic in 1979. Buckminster Fuller (a Sidis classmate) wrote to Gerard Piel in response to this discovery: Imagine my surprise and delight when I was handed a xerox of Sidis' 1925 book, in which he predicted the black hole. His book, The Animate and the Inanimate is a tremendous cosmological work. I find him focusing on the same topics that fascinate me and reaching roughly the same conclusions that I have published in SYNERGETICS and will publish in SYNERGETICS Volume II, which has already gone to press. As a Harvard man of a later generation, I hope you are as excited as I am that Sidis went on to do the most magnificent thinking and writing after college. This is one of the few works by Sidis that was not written under a pen name. In The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis says that the universe is endless and has parts where the laws of physics are backward, called "negative tendencies." Following these are sections where the laws of physics are forward-looking, known as "positive tendencies," which change over time. He claims there was no "origin of life"; life has always existed and only evolved.

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2.

William James Sidis (1898-1944) was born to a psychologist with some unorthodox ideas about child rearing, attended Harvard at an absurdly young age, burned out at 14, and spent most of the rest of his life working menial jobs and living in poverty. Dubbed a ``failed prodigy'' by the popular press, he lived out his years as an eccentric and a recluse. The truth is a lot more complex than this, and the "failure" a matter of perspective, as shown in this remarkable biography. Wallace's book, the only biography of this most enigmatic of prodigies, gives us a balanced look at Sidis' up-bringing and a somewhat revisionist look at his later life. Sidis apparently was hard at work on manuscripts of various sorts even during his later years; this book is to my knowledge the only one that gives an account of that later work, which dealt with American Indians. New manuscripts by Sidis have surfaced since the writing of this book, including a book on traffic accident patterns.

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