Appendix K: William James Sidis

The overlooked genius

The Man

The topic of Newton’s 2nd law, time, and the nature of reality includes the work of several philosophers, great thinkers, and scientists, but omitted from that list is perhaps one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a man few have ever heard of; William James Sidis.

William was born April 1, 1898 and is considered by many to have been the greatest child prodigy in recorded history. His father, Boris, was a Ukrainian Jew and merchant who left Ukraine for New York City after he served his 2-year prison sentence in a 20-square-foot cell for the crime of teaching peasants how to read and write. Boris, along with the thousands of other poor and struggling immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side, scrapped out a miserable existence but never lost sight of his goal to become a doctor. It was there that Boris met his wife, Sarah, also a Russian Jewish immigrant. Not surprisingly, Boris was an atheist and rejected all traditional forms of religion and pedagogy, including Freudian psychology, the manners of education, and their institutionalized diplomas and intelligence tests, calling them “silly, pedantic, and grossly misleading”.

Sarah’s ambitions required her to attain a high school diploma, which she considered a near-impossible task as she only had a 6th-grade education. Boris tutored her in his own manner, showing her how to apply deduction using the first 3 proofs from Euclid’s “The Elements” (c. 300 BC). With that alone, she passed her high school equivalency math test and was eventually accepted into Boston University. Boris received a scholarship from the J. P. Morgan Fund. Boris and Sarah quickly advanced in their fields and became close friends with the day’s leading thinkers. One of these friends was William James, the great philosopher and “Father of American Psychology”, who once asked Sarah, “If they call me a genius, what superlative do they reserve for your husband?”

While Sarah was qualified to practice medicine, she never became a doctor, choosing instead to dedicate her time to being a mother after they had their son, William, who was named after their dear friend. Sarah and Boris believed that parental involvement in child rearing was essential in developing intelligence. William’s intelligence was always considered and supported from the day he was conceived. This nurturing and the fact that he was born to brilliant parents is why he was feeding himself at 8 months and reading the New York Times by 18 months. Sarah shared part of this nurturing process:

Avoid punishment in all ways possible, as it is the first cause of fear. Try not to say, “don’t”. Instead, say why what you say is so. Awaken curiosity; it is the key to learning. Never fail to answer. Never put off your child’s questions. Never force your child to learn nor judge his ability to learn by adult standards. Implant ideas at bedtime just before sleep. Suggestions made then will make a solid impression. Never lie to your child or use evasions. Refrain from showing him off.

At age 4, William learned Greek and, as a birthday gift to his father that same year, also taught himself Latin. By age 8, he had written 4 books on various subjects, including astronomy, anatomy, and the grammar of a new language called vendergoot which William had a hand in creating. His weakest subject was math, but Boris applied the same techniques he used with Sarah, which allowed her to cover 6 years of math in 3 weeks. Soon, William became proficient in math as in all other subjects. He displayed savant-like abilities in math and numbers, being able to instantly know the day on which any day in history occurred, but unlike a savant, who typically have a general intelligence of an imbecile, William’s general intelligence was off the charts. Albert Einstein had an IQ of 160. William’s IQ was estimated to be between 250 and 300 (Note: Many experts believe ratings over 160 quickly become meaningless).

William’s parents’ pre-newage, progressive parenting philosophy did have some drawbacks. Because she did not want to force William to learn, he was enrolled in a regular school, which was a very odd decision. On the other hand, he had to learn how to tolerate the seemingly endless boredom of school, an equally dreadful task for geniuses and morons alike. His suffering was cut short when he was finally accepted to Harvard at age 12, which he had attempted to do since age 9. He occupied himself during this 3-year wait by checking Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for errors and learning foreign languages.

Sadly for William, Harvard was a disappointment. His lack of social graces and athletic abilities, which his father detested, did not endear him to the well-heeled anti-Semitic aristocracy of Harvard. He was treated as a misfit yet shown off like a prize horse. To make matters worse, his father published an essay, “Philistine and Genius (1909), wherein he predicted the coming of WWI, the fall of Europe, the scourge of the Red menace, the evil of growing State authority, industrial greed, the war machine, the dumbing-down of the people due to the education system, and the injustice of the justice system. His essay starts with the premise that “What you [the reader] want is not the training of philistines, but the education of genius.”, and is as insightful into the problems the world faces today as it was then, if not more so. Consequently, the powers-that-be, and the media that worked for them, rained down criticism on him. In modern parlance, he was “canceled”, and his ideas were labeled as “conspiracy theories”, “fake news”, and “disinformation”. As Sarah described:

Boris pulled down upon his stout head, and upon Billy, who was so very young, the anger that comes from hurt pride, and educators, psychologists, editorial writers, newspaper readers, were furious with him, and their fury was a factor in Billy’s life upon which we had not counted.

No doubt, this was a factor in William’s rebellious, anti-establishment views and his involvement in a socialist workers’ demonstration against working conditions in Roxbury, Massachusetts. The conflict between the crowd and the police turned violent, ending in two police killed and many demonstrators being badly beaten. William was arrested as an inciter and for assaulting a police officer and was sentenced to 18 months in jail, but before he could appeal, claiming he was innocent on both counts, his parents “kidnapped” (his words) him in order to protect him from jail by putting him in a New Hampshire sanatorium for one year. This marked the break between William and his father.

Prior to being committed to a mental institution to avoid jail, William’s oddball demeanor made him the butt of many cruel jokes intended to humiliate him. This went so far as to involve girls from Rutgers who would pretend to flirt with him simply to make fun of his social awkwardness or write fake love letters proposing marriage. This humiliation was all the more effective as William never understood when he was being made a fool of until it was too late. He was further ostracized by rumors and stories that he suffered from recurrent nervous breakdowns, was deathly ill, and was losing his eyesight due to overstudying. In fact, other than a case of flu, William was never ill, never wore glasses, and never studied, at least not in the traditional sense, as he did not believe that rote learning was of any value. For William, learning was a form of playing.

The hell that was Harvard did not dissuade William from entering Harvard Graduate School to study law, but after he was physically threatened, he decided to take a position at Price University in Texas. It was also here that he wrote his speculative yet scholarly work on Newton’s 2nd law, titled “The Animate and Inanimate”. This brilliant work received no public attention, mainly because William was presented as an unhinged anti-establishment boy wonder that had burned out and never achieved any greatness in the accepted arenas of the day. While William continued to write, he refused to publish under his own name given the stain and prejudice that the media had placed on it, but publishers refused to publish under his pen name, as they knew it was his name that would sell books, not the content.

William concluded that the only way to live a perfect life is to live in solitude, and with this decision, he disappeared from the spotlight. He took on menial jobs and hid his identity. He would later say, “The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill. All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won’t let me alone.”

William’s last public appearance was in 1937, when he unsuccessfully sued the New Yorker for invasion of privacy¹. This loss marked a precedent in privacy law, as the judge ruled that once a person is a public figure, they’re always a public figure (vloggers take note).

To this day, the genius of William James Sidis is ignored, eclipsed by the same bottom-feeding yellow journalism that poisoned society 100 years ago, as evidenced by this New Yorker description of the article that William sued the New Yorker over in 1937:²

Reminiscent story of William James Sidis, the boy genius who at the age of 11 lectured on the Fourth Dimension at a gathering of about 100 professors & advanced students of mathematics from Harvard University. At the age of 16 he entered Harvard Law School. He attended law school quietly for three years, but his main interest was mathematics. In 1919, he took part in a Communistic demonstration in Roxbury and was arrested for inciting to riot. While out on bail, he disappeared. Since then he has been working as a clerk for a salary not large enough to subsist him. In 1926, he got out a volume on the collection of streetcar transfers. He has a collection of about 1,600 of them. Today he is living in a hall bedroom of Boston’s shabby end, working as a clerk in a business house. Sidis died July 17, 1944. This information from a reader who was doing research on him. She telephoned first on Jan. 24 & then on the 25th, 1990.

The Work

The book “The Animate and Inanimate” is William’s most significant work by many. It was published in 1920 when he was 21, which means it was published while he was in the sanatorium. In essence, this book is a speculative, unprovable theory of the reversibility of the Universe and, therefore, the laws of motion, entropy, and time. William was hesitant to publish this work but was moved to after discovering the following quote from Lord Kelvin:

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 inquiry 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. ~Lord Kelvin

In other words, the existence of life breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics or at least appears to. Therefore, there must be some invisible force that the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply to, similar in concept to James Maxwell’s “demon” described earlier.

William suggests the idea that a reverse Universe would be akin to one’s reflection in a mirror, where all details are exactly the same but where the time dimension of reality occurs in reverse order. To be clear, William is referring to a quantitative reversal, not a qualitative reversal, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 becomes 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, not -1, -2, -3, -4 -5.

According to William, it can be proven that all the laws of physics work identically in both worlds, except the 2nd law of thermodynamics or that of entropy. This is the single distinguishing feature of our “forward moving” that makes reality move in the direction it does. This means that, for example, the dissipation of energy as heat, the most dissipated form of energy, in forward world becomes the most concentrated source of energy in reverse world. This also tells us that in the reverse world, all energy will eventually become concentrated into a singularity. In other words, the probability that all energy will ultimately concentrate into a singularity in reverse world is the same probability that a bowling ball will scatter the pins on impact in forward world. William goes on to speculate that, if this is the case, then there must be a time in the past when all energy was concentrated into one point or source. Today we know this as the Big Bang and black holes.

The idea of black holes goes back to astronomer Karl Schwarzschild who came up with the concept of what would be called “frozen stars” in 1916 after reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and warped space. William, 4 years after Schwarzschild’s hypothesis, arrives at the same conclusions using only the 2nd law of thermodynamics as evidence and goes on to describe the expanding Universe 2 years before Friedmann theorized that concept and the Big Bang, or what he called the Great Collision, 7 years before that idea was conceived in 1927 by Lemaître.

William then goes on to conclude that the Universe must have been created by two “halves” of the Universe, each a Universe unto itself, both at rest and at 0° in temperature, colliding into each other, and it was at this point only that the 2nd law of thermodynamics came into effect. While this is not how modern science understands the Big Bang, his ideas were based purely on reason and came close to what we understand today. Given the questions that still remain unanswered, who can say that he won’t be proven correct in the future? It is also interesting that his ideas are perfectly in-line with the tholonic concept of creation being two opposing forces in its initial and all subsequent creation.

William posits that within this Universe, there exists an instance where the 2nd law does exist in reverse. This is not impossible, as the 2nd law is not actually a physical law but rather a highly probable statistical result, and therefore, not being a law, is capable of being violated. Where such an inversion of the law might exist, it would reverse entropy, concentrating energy rather than dispersing it. William explains how and why this is a reasonable assumption and even gives an example of how we might recognize such a process. Today we know at least one way that can actually happen³, although how it happens is probably a bit different from the way William suggests.