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]
“Animal life acts the part of Clerk-Maxwell's sorting demon.”
Maxwell's demon, however, was supposedly exorcised by
Hungarian-American physicist Leó Szilárd in 1929; a proof that lays question to Sidis' theory. [3]EconomicsThe following is a popular 1938 quote by Sidis: [5]
“The laws that govern the structure of an economic system cannot, in the nature of things, be set aside or altered by anything a mere government can do.”
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End years
After returning to Boston, Sidis got a small South End apartment, took clerical jobs, and went on with his writing, living in relative seclusion. He began to be jarred again when in August 1937,
Boston Sunday Advertiser and the
New Yorker ran articles about him. The
New Yorker piece, bylined "Jared L. Manley" but reworked by James Thurber, was titled "April Fool." Sidis had had enough. He sued both publications. The
Advertiser eventually settled for $375. In a breach-of-privacy suit against the
New Yorker, the court ruled that Sidis could not claim privacy rights because he was still a public figure. In 1944 the magazine paid a reported $500 to settle a companion suit for malicious libel. Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage three months later. He was 46. [4]