Animate things
A division of "things", from Libb Thims' BPE 2016 talk (ΡΊ), into two categories: animate, or things whose atomic geometry changes per unit time, and inanimate, or things whose atomic geometry does not change per unit time.
In science, animate, from PIE root ane- ‘to blow, breath’, from Greek anemos ‘wind’ or Snskrit aniti ‘he breaths’, as contrasted with inanimate, as it refers to matter that moves, or in defunct colloquial phraseology, defines matter or molecular structure that is alive, i.e. powered CHNOPS+ matter. [1]

Overview
In 1954, Belgian-born English thermodynamicist Alfred Ubbelohde defined animate as follows: [2]

Animate matter [is] termed ‘life’ for short.”

To understand when a piece of matter or molecular unit, such as a DNA molecule, bacteria molecule, or human molecule, etc., becomes animated, logic such as the "induced movement", driving force, exchange force, thermodynamic force, energy source perspectives, etc., are needed. The 1920 thermodynamics book The Animate and the Inanimate, by American prodigy William Sidis, is an example of a publication that makes significant use of the term animate. [3]

Thermodynamically-speaking, the only difference between animate and inanimate systems is that the animate system receives external forcing. When this forcing is removed, the system will degrade in accordance with the second law to a state of equilibrium. An example of a large, animate system is the earth, which can be idealized as a type of large photon mill, where the external forcing comes from, to a large extent, the sun.

As the animate system is driven to the equilibrium state, it will undergo a free energy change, and will have ever-decreasing amounts of free energy available to the system for it to carry out internal work, or work on its surroundings, and thus the animate system will ultimately become inanimate. The time duration of an animate system in which it changes from animate to inanimate is often referred to as its "persistence".

Fundamentally, an animate system is a system on which work must be done by the surroundings, and which via interaction with its surroundings must be subject to periodical increases of its free energy such that it may perform work in changing its internal configuration, possibly in response to changes in its surroundings.

Reference
1. (a) Animate – Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 2000.
(b) Animus – EtymOnline.com.
(c) Animate – EtymOnline.com.
2. (a) Ubbelohde, Alfred René. (1947). Time and Thermodynamics, (ch. IX: “Thermodynamics and Life”). Oxford University Press.

(b) Ubbelohde, Alfred René. (1954). Man and Energy ... Illustrated, (Section: XIII: Thermodynamics and Life, pg. 183-200, Section: XIV: Thermodynamic Laws and Cognition, pg. 201-09). London: Hutchinson's Scientific & Technical Publications.
2. Sidis, William J. (1920). The Animate and the Inanimate, [PDF], (published in 1925, R.G. Badger).
3. Pauling, Linus. (1970). General Chemistry, (section: "The Nature of Life", pgs. 767-69). New York: Dover.
4.
Lahanas, Michael. (c.2010). “Heron of Alexandra”, MLahanas.de.

Further reading
● Bakewell, Frederick. (1835). Natural Evidence of a Future Life: Derived from the Properties and Actions of Animate and Inanimate Matter. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green.
● Toulmin, Stephen E. and Goodfield, June. (1962). The Architecture of Matter: the Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology of Matter, both Animate and Inanimate, as it has Evolved from the Beginnings of Time. Harper and Row.

External links
● Animate (disambiguation) – Wikipedia.

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