The Animate and the Inanimate: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Animate and the Inanimate, credited to William James Sidis, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Animate and the Inanimate by William James Sidis. Read in English by Leon Harvey 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

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Animate and the Inanimate
• Author credits: William James Sidis
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 19
• Listed recording duration: 3:35:09

Catalogue topics

• theoretical physics

Track guide

1. 00 - Preface — 6:05
2. 01 - I. The Reverse Universe — 8:42
3. 02 - II. Reversible Laws — 4:25
4. 03 - III. Irreversibility — 8:13
5. 04 - IV. The Paradox — 16:05
6. 05 - V. The Probabilities in the Problem — 4:56
7. 06 - VI. Solution of the Paradox — 12:30
8. 07 - VII. Theories of Life — 13:52
9. 08 - VIII. The Extension of the Second Law — 11:43
10. 09 - IX. The Relation Between the Tendencies — 5:44
11. 10 - X. Exothermic and Endothermic Substances — 8:41
12. 11 - XI. Theories of the Origin of Life — 11:06
13. 12 - XII. The Astronomical Universe — 26:43
14. 13 - XIII. The Nebular Hypothesis — 20:09
15. 14 - XIV. The Reversibility Theory of Cosmogony — 9:03
16. 15 - XV. The Pseudo-Living Organisms — 10:54
17. 16 - XVI. Psychological Aspect of Reversal — 15:25
18. 17 - XVII. General Summary of the Theory — 13:06
19. 18 - XVIII. Some Objections to the Reversibility Theory. XIX. Conclusion — 7:47

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.