In human thermodynamics, William James Sidis (1898-1944) was an American mathematical child prodigy notable for his 1920 book The Animate and the Inanimate, in which he set forth the view that life is a "reversal of the second law"; a book in which he also postulated the existence of dark matter. The following is the opening abstract, written at the age of 22: [1]

“This work sets forth a theory which is speculative in nature, there being no verifying experiments. It is based on the idea of the reversibility of everything in time; that its, that every type of process has its time-image, a corresponding process which is its exact reverse with respect to time. This accounts for all physical laws but one, namely, the second law of thermodynamics.”

Sidis, along with Goethe, both of which who were driven to outline a thermodynamic theory of life, are coincidentally both among the top hand-full of people in the world to have estimated IQs of 210+.

The Animate and the Inanimate

See main: The Animate and the Inanimate

Sidis' 1920 The Animate and the Inanimate was the only published book by him in which he used his own name, signifying it as his self-defined greatest work. [2] Sidis stated that he was at first hesitant to publish this theory, but that he gained confidence on discovering the following quotation by William Thomson:

"It is conceivable that animal life might have the attribute of using the heat of surrounding matter, at its natural temperature, as a source of energy for mechanical effect . . . . the influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific enquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms."

With this fuel of support, building on the "reserve energy" theories of American psychologist William James (whom Sidis was named after), in which a person is theorized to have latent mental stores of energies (such as second or third winds of thought), along with English physicist William Thomson's views on life and the second law, and Scottish physicist James Maxwell's conception of an intelligent demon able to circumnavigate the second law, Sidis used a theory of probability to argue that a vital force exists in living matter able to supply available energy, in a converse manner to entropy (unavailable energy) such that: [1]


References
1. (a) Sidis, William J. (1920). The Animate and the Inanimate, [PDF], (published in 1925, R.G. Badger).
(b) Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law operated in reverse to the temporal direction experienced in our local area; meaning that everything outside of the galaxy would be such a region. Sidis claimed that the matter in this region would not generate light.
2. (a) Sidis published the 1935 book The Tribes and the States under the pseudonym "John W. Shattuck" and also wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers under the pseudonym of "Frank Folupa".
(b) Notes the Collection of Sidis' pseudonyms - Sidis.net
3. (a) Szilárd, Leó. (1929). “On the Decrease in Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings”, Zeitschrift fur Physik, 53, 840-56.
(b) English translation of “On the Decrease in Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings” by Anatol Rapoport and Mechthilde Knoller in Maxwell’s Demon 2 (pgs. 110-19) by Harvey Leff and Andrew Rex.

Further reading
1. Wallace, Amy. (1986). The Prodigy: a Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatist Child Prodigy. Dutton Adult.