Reversible Physical Laws

If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.

Boris Sidis

The man of genius whether as an artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention.

Boris Sidis

William James Sidis died hidden, largely. A former child prodigy in mathematics and polyglotism, purportedly. Many myths exist about the man. Nonetheless, he represented a social scientific experiment by his father, Boris Sidis, M.D., Ph.D., to see the capacities of the mind stretched to a limit at an early age. 

The Animate and the Inanimate remains the main work publicly counted as part of the canon of Sidis. In this text, he proposes something of a twin-universe inversion thought experiment with, on the one hand, an ‘ordinary’ universe, such as our own, and, on the other hand, a reverse universe or an opposition universe to the ‘ordinary’ universe vis-à-vis the variable of time. 

One of the earliest sections covers reversible physical laws. The “physical” seems disputable to me. However, the reversible physical laws appear rather apt as a descriptor of the situation at hand. By and large, the dynamics of the universe remain the same, surprisingly, in such a thought experiment upon reading and reflecting on Sidis. 

The reversal of the known laws in the 1920s, or the time of the publication of the text, would result in a frame rate of the same gaps, scale of the same size, and cause-and-effect cosmos of the current order, merely in reverse order. 

Bill was an avowed atheist on a first-order analysis, did not believe ‘in the big boss of the Christians,’ and believed, potentially, in something beyond the human. In some sense, one can consider a matrix of beliefs with a panendeistic view as a more in-depth perspective while an atheistic view, as a first approximation, seems reasonable too. 

The difference between no gods and one that doesn’t personally care seems nil on an individual basis. The reversal of velocity, acceleration, effects on constituent parts of atoms, of mass, and the like, would appear the same in the original universe and in the reverse universe. Reversible physical law seems set here. 

Any consideration of a change of an object or a force in the real universe must correspond to a change of an object or a force in the reverse universe in like manner while in opposition to the axis of time. 

In this, any alteration of a velocity will require a countermanding velocity. The change of velocity requires another velocity. All forces in either universe remain the same and, therefore, the changes in the force in one make for a change in the other in the reverse time direction. The first law of thermodynamics, by logical deduction, remains the same in the reverse time universe as in the real universe. 

A change of momentum is proportional to the force impressed in the second law of motion. Whether a reverse time universe or the real universe, the momentum does not change, thus the second law of motion retains fundamental character. 

The third law of motion is every action has an equal and opposite reaction. With the first two established, we come to the factuality of the third. The three laws of motion retain their character in a reverse time universe. 

Wherein, the laws and forces of the real universe exhibit a universal quality to them. For the conservation of energy and matter, Bill Sidis explains, laws of attraction and repulsion, of refraction and reflection, can be reversed; all can be made in a fake universe with only a reversion of the factor of time while retaining their fundamental character. 

At one basic level, physical laws with the capability of reversion through time are a powerful thought experiment on the nature of time and the relation of law to reality.