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.

Poetry. Art. "Drawing the ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIM together, they settle into difference. With subtle contagion of body as structured text, titled ligatures in the midst, thick with emotional materiel, Brenda Iijima's work rhymes--off or near--sight as sound. Nature for culture, culture as nature, 'we/ can play school under a tree' or at war. Breaking and building in twitchy compression, the way Marie Menken's hand-held camera swings, framed and fabulous, this exuberant tragic book of drawings and poems will hook you"--Norma Cole. "A kind of necessity is created here for saying, rejuvenating myths, turning anger into jouissance, making thoughts a river of light...Beware: we won't be chagrined anymore; such subversion is the changing of the world"--Etel Adnan

A group of distinguished social scientists from a wide range of academic backgrounds the opportunity to reflect on social cognitive development.

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.

The Animate and the Inanimate was a book written by child prodigy and polymath William James Sidis (1898-1944), detailing his thoughts on the origins of life, cosmology, the potential reversibility of the second law through Maxwell's Demon, among other things. It was published in 1925, however it is suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. 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. In The Animate and the Inanimate, William James Sidis states that the universe is infinite, as well as it containing sections of "negative tendencies" where various laws of physics were reversed that are juxtaposed with "positive tendencies", which switch over epochs of time. Sidis' theory at the time of its release was ignored, only to be found in an attic in 1979.

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