How long does it take to read The Animate and the Inanimate?
William James Sidis
The Animate and the Inanimate by William James Sidis takes about 2 hours 40 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 40 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1925. 145 pages, about 39,875 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 26 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 40 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 40 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
What is fascinating about this book is that the deep amount of theory contained, a sort of theory of everything attempting to integrate the second law, with the nebular hypothesis, and evolution, among other phenomenon such as "black body stars" (black holes) as he called them, the "big collision" (big bang) theory of the origin of the universe, etc., was conceived in 1915-1916 as a sort of passing hobby by a seventeen-year-old child prodigy during his summer off who had just finished a mathematics degree at Harvard and was on his way to Law School at Cambridge. To give a decent representative quote: "Our theory of the origin of life is that there is no origin, but only a constant development and change of form." He mixes this in with discussions of endothermic and exothermic movements of matter in relation to animate matter (humans) and inanimate matter (food), into and out of the body, in way that seems to foreshadow the concept of free energy coupling developed in the 1920s through the 1940s, all in relation to chemical experiments and findings, such as the Haber process.
Subjects: Science, Philosophy, Cosmogony, Second law of thermodynamics, Black holes (Astronomy)
