4The 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.