World's smartest person wrote this one mysterious book

If you've ever come across one of those click-bait list articles with titles, like The 10 Smartest People in the World, then you may have seen

this

name pop up. William James Sidis. His name is often included in these lists along with the claim that his IQ is between 250 and 300. For context, a result higher than any recorded result and anything higher than 140 is considered genius. People like Steven Hawking and Einstein are said to have an IQ of around 160. Now, from what I can tell,

this

claim about William Sidis's IQ seems very dubious. In fact, I can't find any evidence that he ever took an IQ test.

It was his sister who said that a psychologist had once measured his IQ between 250 and 300. But that could have been a misunderstanding or an exaggeration when William

wrote

to his sister that he had just done a civil service exam. so he obtained position 254 on the list of candidates. But he himself described it as not so encouraging. What is true about William Sidis is that he was very intelligent and a child prodigy. The New York Times reported on him when he was 10 years old and had just passed the MIT entrance exam. He says that when he was two years old he knew how to read and write.

And when he was four years old, he could speak four languages. What is also true about William Sidis is that he has a very interesting story. And I'll share that story in this video, as well as some of the work he left behind. He set the record for being the youngest

person

to enroll at Harvard at age 11. And at the age of 12, he gave a lecture there on four-dimensional bodies. William's father, Boris Sidis, was a psychiatrist and his mother, Sarah, was a doctor. They had a lot of ideas about developmental psychology and put a lot of effort into raising William to be a prodigy.

They spent the leftover money on

book

s and learning tools for him and fed his hunger for knowledge. William Sidis is named after his father's friend, William James, who was a philosopher and psychologist. It was Boris Sidis and William James, who together proposed the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. And they tested this theory on young William. When William demonstrated great talents in learning, it was considered proof that most people only achieve a fraction of their full mental potential. It was called reserve energy theory and Boris was trying to unlock his son's reserve energy. This idea of ​​10% of the brain is largely considered a myth now, and Wikipedia says that it is based on folklore, not science, and that brain mapping suggests that all areas of the brain have a function and are used almost all the time. but keep that reserve energy theory in mind, because it's important to this story in unexpected ways.

The life of a child prodigy was not easy for William. He was constantly talked about and struggled to fit in with the older students, both at school and at university. After graduating, he told reporters that he wanted to live the perfect life, which for him meant living in seclusion. He abandoned his studies in mathematics and law and was even arrested for participating in a political parade. After that incident, his parents tried to reform him, but he soon distanced himself from them and began to live a very independent and private life. He ended up suing The New Yorker for an article they published about him calling him a loner and invading his privacy.

The sentiment of that article, as well as many modern footnotes about him, seemed to imply that despite his great initial promise, he either came up with nothing or suffered a complete mental breakdown due to his parents putting too much pressure on him, mentally. when I was a child. But in all those years that William Sidis lived out of the public eye, he was still learning, writing, and sharing knowledge. He published many

book

s under pseudonyms, but here I have one that he published under his own name. It's called The Animate and The Inanimate and it was published in 1920, when he was 22 years old.

He details a theory of his that relates to cosmology, physics, and life. So let's take a look at it. Sidis says that this work is based on the idea of ​​the reversibility of everything over time. That is, all physical laws work in reverse, but there is an exception and it is the second law of thermodynamics. The second law relates to the idea that, for example, you have a bunch of particles in a box. At first they may all be concentrated in one corner, but over time they will disperse. And it is so extremely unlikely that everyone will gather in that corner, that we consider it impossible.

With this we see that the heat flow goes from hot to cold. Water is not seen to spontaneously turn into ice because it is a very unlikely flow of energy. Sidis then mentions the idea of ​​Maxwell's demon, that if you had a reversal of this second law of thermodynamics, you could imagine a sorting demon that could separate the slower particles from the faster ones, a demon could do this by monitoring some sort of barrier between two halves of the box, which only allows slow particles to enter the left side and fast particles to enter the right.

You would see the left side of the box get cold and the right side get hot. Something that wouldn't happen naturally, but seems to have made available some kind of energy flow between cold and heat. The second law of thermodynamics also brought in the idea of ​​entropy, which is constantly increasing, and over the next hundred pages, William Sidis explores the idea that perhaps in some regions of space we will see a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics. And in these regions the entropy flows in the other direction. He also claims that perhaps these regions are what we know as life, that instead of defining life as something that is capable of reproducing or growing or responding to the environment, we define it as something that is capable of taking what we might have thought. as unavailable energy and convert it into a reserve pool of energy used only by life and created by non-living forces.

And then he mentions the work of his father's friend, Professor William James, who discovered in the domain of mental phenomena what he calls reserve energy. That's 10% of the brain's idea. So William Sidis is embracing this idea that he was raised to believe in and that his father was very involved in. And perhaps he will credit the reason why they call him the prodigy and try to apply it to physics, thermodynamics and the laws of the universe. He does mention that this work is purely speculative and that there are no experiments to verify what it suggests. This work never really reached an audience.

And perhaps that made Sidis feel despondent and he did not publish more well-known works on physics. This work was virtually unknown until it was rediscovered in an attic in 1979. Now let's look at a few more chapters. The first few chapters look at some of the physical laws and explore what they might look like in a reverse universe. He says that in the real universe, energy descends to a common level and in the reverse universe, energy tends to accumulate at different levels. In the real universe, we would see a definitive heat death mentioned here, when all the energy is in the form of heat, its least concentrated form and in a uniform concentration.

A dead level of energy would be reached. And after that, nothing else could happen in the universe. That is unless the heat was able to accumulate at different levels and be converted back into mechanical or kinetic energy like in a reverse universe. Now, I don't mean to make any of this sound too credible, and there are a lot of dubious claims here: we have here the requirement that the mechanical efficiency in the reverse universe be greater than one hundred percent, just as the second law of thermodynamics is. really an overwhelming probability rather than a law. So is their reversal: in this reverse universe, these probabilities are weighted in the opposite direction.

Sidis believes that, if we go back, there must have been a time in the past when the available energy was one hundred percent of the entire universe, and there must have been what he called a large collision, where everything was at a temperature of absolute zero. . And there were two semi-universes moving towards each other, in each of which there was not even a trace of relative motion. Sidis believes that in our own universe, 50% of cases will obey the second law of thermodynamics. And in 50% of cases it will be reversed. The universe as a whole will be neutral.

So where is this whole reverse universe apparently hiding? Well, Sidis believed that there were large areas of space that trended in the positive direction and others that trended in the opposite direction. That the universe is made up of a series of what we could call bricks, ultimately positive and negative, all of approximately the same volume arranged like a three-dimensional chessboard. That what we see is simply the blank space we are in. The black spaces that surround us are invisible. In them the laws of thermodynamics would be predominantly inverted. The stars in those black spaces would be upside-down stars that instead of emitting light, absorb light.

This is an intriguing part of his discussion because he is doing a good job of describing what we would now call black holes. He calls these inverse stars perfectly black bodies. These stars use radiant energy to generate a higher level of heat. He says that we can only see stars in the section of space where the second law of thermodynamics prevails, but that there is an additional part of the universe that is not visible to us. These black spaces even absorb light from the white spaces beyond them. So even we can't see them. And by observing the distribution of light in the sky, we get an idea simply of the size and shape of our special white space.

And if you think Sidis is predicting the existence of black holes here, keep in mind that this is 47 years before the term black hole was first used and almost 20 years before Chandrasekhar even theorized the existence of something like a black hole. He says that the boundary surface is between the positive and negative sections of space that when light crosses it, it does so in a direction from the positive side to the negative side. If we were on the positive side, as seems to be the case, then we would not be able to see beyond that surface.

We could easily have evidence of gravitational or other types of bodies that exist beyond the surface. And that seems to have a lot in common with what we know as the event horizon. Sidis then mentions a supernova and suggests that the explosion of a star must be a change from the negative trend to the positive trend that in the universe the stars will constantly cross from one section to the next and that when this happens and a star Al moving from a positive to a negative section of the universe, a slow developmental process of the growth of life occurs, gradually changing the star from positive to negative.

And here you can begin to see where the title of this book The Animate and The Inanimate comes from. Sidis says that inanimate phenomena are positive tendencies and follow the second law of thermodynamics, while animate phenomena, on the contrary, are negative tendencies and tend to reverse that law. There is a motivation behind many of these strange connections, which comes from the fact that at the time this book was written, around 1920, there was a lot about biology and living processes that we did not understand. And we have learned a lot more since then; The way biological processes work within living bodies and the way cells process energy is much less of a mystery to us now.

And much of what we know about biology wouldn't compare to some of these claims - even the way our brains work was much less understood. Sidis calls it the central organ in which reserve energy is stored. And it seems like if he had grown up in any other family, he probably wouldn't have had that idea or tried to make that kind of connection. Some of the claims become increasingly dubious as the pages turn, but Sidis himself even acknowledges this and ends with some objections to his theory. He emphasizes that this work is just mere speculation. One objection is that we have no evidence that life actually reverses the second law of thermodynamics.

Instead, we have abundant evidence that living bodies obey the second law. The theory also assumes that life exists everywhere and under all types of circumstances, but that contrasts with what we actually observe when it comes to life. Rather, it appears to be an extremely complex phenomenon that can only exist in very special circumstances. Sidis says that he will leave it to the reader to compare the theory for himself and weigh the various arguments for and against. This book remained virtually unknown for many decades. When it was found again in 1979, it was given to Buckminster Fuller, who turned out to be a former classmate of William Sidis at Harvard.Buckminster Fuller gave the work, perhaps his first proper review.

He said he felt excitement and joy when he was given a copy of the book, which, according to him, clearly predicts the black hole. Many people commenting on Sidis's life have said that it meant nothing and that they did not utilize any of his academic brilliance. But Fuller says here: I hope you are as excited as I am by this discovery that Sidis came to think and write magnificently after college. Sidis' work is difficult to understand and we may never find a place for it within modern theories, but Sidis himself was also difficult for society to understand.

People prickled at the first signs of his weakness, perhaps to feel better about themselves. William didn't deserve the pressure of having to continually prove his genius. That a child prodigy grows up and collapses under the mental burden of his childhood is an easier narrative to tell than to understand the alternative ways in which we all try to live a fulfilling life. This portion of the video is sponsored by Skillshare. If you watched this video, you're probably interested in examples of exceptional abilities and ways to reach your own potential. If you want to learn from experts and foster your own skills, check out Skillshare, which is an online learning community with thousands of online classes, it's a place to get inspired, learn new skills, and put them to work in impactful ways.

I spent much of the last year learning stop motion animation for Finding X. And this PES course is a great introduction to the technique from one of YouTube's top stop motion animators. There is a special link in the description and the first 1000 people who click on it will get a free trial of Skillshare for one month. So check it out. Thanks for watching, a special shout out to the patron cats of today's Pan and Tilt Day.