In hmolscience, Andres Florez Amaya (c.1984-) is Colombian microbiologist and cancer researcher noted for his 2013 blog “Thermodynamics of Love” which attempts a thermodynamics of love conceptualized approach to explain love and relationships via a mixture of John Gottman’s The Mathematics of Love (2005) and protein thermodynamics. [1]
Thermodynamics of love
The following are the main sections from Florez' 2013 blog “Thermodynamics of Love”, divided by interjection and commentary: [1]
“This was one of my first notes and I would like to share it with you. The basic idea is to show how love can be interpreted in terms of energy consumption and how these can affect relationships. One of the main arguments against studying love and relationships more quantitatively is that emotions and human feelings are always assumed to be very complex and impossible to describe by current sophisticated scientific methods.Phrases like ‘love is so incomprehensible, that is better to silence the mind and let everything flow and don't make any questions at all’, are very frequent among people. It could be that this is true, but aren’t you dear reader, a little curious, of what are the reasons for breaking up or being together in the first place?. In my opinion, there is a lot of help that science can give to elucidate the mechanisms of love dynamics, especially why people break up. A lot of work has been done in the past, especially by the famous psychologist John Gottman (who has an institute about relationships), and published a very interesting book called The Mathematics of Marriage. The book is interesting in the sense that he was able to collect data and predict if a couple was going to divorce or not with very high accuracy. The mathematical models are actually not very complicated, but this tells you that something can be done to make our lives more pleasant by involving the reason in how we choose our partners.”
Next, Florez discusses the energy minimization principle, derived from the second law, and protein stability—ideas which he may have gleaned from his 2010 “Protein Network Prediction” (Ѻ) article—as a basis to explain stability in human relationships:
“Without doing too much math, one could easily thing about a fundamental principle every relationship should have, the ‘minimum energy’. This comes from the second law of thermodynamics. As a simple example, in the case of proteins in the cell, they need to be folded correctly in order to perform the correct function. This folding could be spontaneous or sometimes helped by other proteins. However, “in order to be stable, the conformation has to have the lowest energy possible”. This is a very critical point to discuss about relationships. The stability in a relationships, meaning, the possibility to stay together for long periods of time, depends mostly on the energy expended in the relationship.”
Florez then tries to illustrate in terms of energy expended in courting and fighting:
“I will give real life example to illustrate my point: Normally when a man is dating a girl, it is clear that he has to expend a lot of energy,and by energy I mean the time, gifts, attention and so on, that the guy expends on the girl to capture her attention (some girls need a lot of energy J), this is reasonable and it is what should be done; however, this only happens at the beginning of the relationship most of the times (I guess most of the girls get disappointed about this). However, this initial energy has to be reduced, in the sense that the attraction becomes more rational and less emotional. Evolutionary speaking, this has to be done in this way, otherwise we would be sick by the dopamine effects or in thermodynamic words, we become unstable because of the excess of energy.”
Next, he talks about interaction energy and couple energy:
“Once the relationship is started, the individual energy becomes [transforms] into the energy of the couple. This does not change the principle at all—coming back to the example of the proteins—when two or more proteins interact, they should keep the interaction energy low to have a stable interaction (stable relationship in the case of the couple). So the question is now, what is this couple energy?. When we think about it, most of the couple energy is normally expended in fights, and those fights whatever the reason is, it always comes from the fact that the couple has a lot of interaction energy that is not favorable, and here it comes the secret, the energy is high in fights because one thing is missing … the affinity!!!”
Here, with is mention of ‘affinity’, things begin to teeter off into statements of illogic, which no doubt has to do with the fact that the subject of the thermodynamic theory of affinity is something that but a few historians of chemistry are knowledgeable about:
“The affinity basically indicates, what people normally call ‘chemistry’ or the ‘spark’. This chemistry pretty much depends on the compatibility, like having similar likes, similar hobbies, similar ways of thinking, the more affinity the lowest energy and therefore more stability. It sounds tricky, but it is a fundamental principle. Sometimes we think love can manage everything, which for some exceptional cases it can, but there must be affinity in order to be stable.”
Next, he goes into a discussion of debonding:
“According to recent studies, one of the most common cases of divorce is actually no because of cheating, it is because the couple got bored. And getting bored is just a consequence that the couple is not enjoying or not trying exciting things together, like for example go for tango dancing, jump from an helicopter, learn Chinese, things like that. And maybe this boring behavior was a consequence of not having high affinity from the beginning. Love chemistry is not a mystery; it works in the same way as real chemistry. If you have a strong chemistry with someone, you will have a high chance to maintain low energy and in this way you will have a stable and exciting relationship ... sound easy!!!. This low energy status, however, is not easy to get and depends also in some other little things besides affinity. You could love with passion, which is good and desirable, but when your brain is investing high levels of energy trying to solve problems that don't depend on you, then it becomes a problem.”
Florez then concludes with what seems to be the example that mental time and energy wasted on hypothetical cheating scenarios, is akin to or an aspect of the endothermic or endergonic aspects of bond breakage:
“For instance, if your girlfriend/boyfriend didn't call you when you said, you could start imaging several things and generate a ‘movie’ in your head, and those imaginations need a lot of glucose from your brain, and suppose you're wasting 400 kilojoules thinking about something that is not true, you could win a Nobel Prize investing that energy in research (some people will argue that you also need luck). But it is not people’s fault, the idea as it is concluded from the previous arguments, is to look for the right person that makes you feel good, as everybody want, with the condition to keep low energy status in order to have a successful relationship, this can only be achieved if you have a strong affinity with that person.”
(add discussion)
Education
In 2006, Florez completed his BS in microbiology, at the University of Pamplona, Columbia. From 2007 to 2010, Florez joined the “Program of Study and Control of Tropical Diseases” at University of Antioquia as a research associate since 2007 until 2010, and undertook a project to search for new drug targets by detecting essential proteins in the Leishmania major, Leishmania infantum and Leishmania braziliensis protein networks which were predicted by using protein sequence and structural information; a fruitful result of which was the proposal of new drug target candidates to be analyzed by virtual screening with future plans to evaluate the selected compounds by in vitro assays. [2] This may have been where Florez learned about drug-receptor thermodynamics and or protein thermodynamics, which he seems to employ in his 2013 "Thermodynamics of Love" blog. In 2010, Florez began working towards his PhD with a dissertation “Understanding the Role of MYCN in Neuroblastoma Tumors Using Systems Biology” at the Division of Theoretical Systems Biology, at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; a project seeming complete in 2013. (Ѻ)
See also
● David Hwang
References
1. (a) Florez, Andres. (2013). “Thermodynamics of Love”, Science & Salsa, Blogspot.de, Mar 19.
(b) Florez, Andres. (2014). “Thermodynamics of Love”, Insanitek.net, Feb 3.
(c) Gottman, John M. (2005). The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models. Bradford Books.
2. Andres Florez Amaya (about) – University of Antioquia, Columbia.
Further reading
● Florez, Andres. (2013). “The Oscillatory Behavior of Happiness”, Science & Salsa, Blogspot.de, Mar 19.
External links
● Andrés Flórez (profile) – Blogger.com.
● Andres Florez (profile) – University of Heidelberg, Germany.