
An illustration of the “change” from chapter two (P1:C2), when Edward (B) and Charlotte (A) are dullingly married, prior to the Captain’s (C) arrival to the estate (chemical retort), to chapter three (P1:C3), in which Edward “detaches” (see: uncoupling; debond) from Charlotte, and begins spending time with his old friend the Captain, therein forming the BC attachment, i.e. Edward≡Captain bond, tie, union, or association; the symbols "≡" (stronger bond) and "=" (strong bond) employed, respectively, for the Edward=Charlotte bond vs the Edward≡Captain bond, quantitatively differentiated in Gibbs energy measurement terms.

An illustration of the “change” from chapter two (P1:C2), when Edward (B) and Charlotte (A) are dullingly married, prior to the Captain’s (C) arrival to the estate (chemical retort), to chapter three (P1:C3), in which Edward “detaches” (see: uncoupling; debond) from Charlotte, and begins spending time with his old friend the Captain, therein forming the BC attachment, i.e. Edward≡Captain bond, tie, union, or association; the symbols "≡" (stronger bond) and "=" (strong bond) employed, respectively, for the Edward=Charlotte bond vs the Edward≡Captain bond, quantitatively differentiated in Gibbs energy measurement terms.

In hmolscience, Edward≡Captain, or BC in the original Bergman chemical letter notation (Bergman, 1775), is the chemical symbol for the bonded chemical species, or dihumanide molecule, of the character Edward and the Captain chemically “bonded”, with a concordant measurable bond energy, into a new friendship union, which is a reaction formation that occurs in chapter three (see: P1:C3) of Goethe’s 1809 Elective Affinities (see: contents).

Overview

See main: Human chemical reaction theory

In 1809, Goethe, in chapter three of his Elective Affinities, while he did say that Edward was equivalent, in a macroscopic physico-chemical sense, to the chemical species B and that the Captain was equivalent to the chemical species C and that Charlotte was equivalent to the chemical species A, he did not explicitly, in the text, affix the symbols AB or BC together, but rather had the bonding brackets of William Cullen in mind in the sense of the chemical force holding the two species together, as explained in Torbern Bergman’s 1775 A Dissertation on Elective Attractions, wherein both letter symbols, A, B, C, etc. were employed, to represent species, and the bonding brackets were employed to represent chemical bonds.

In 1991, Karl Fink, in his Goethe’s History of Science, after footnoting his knowledge of Jeremy Adler’s 1987 depictions of Goethe’s human chemical reactions, stating that he “Adler has provided the most detailed study of Goethe’s research in the history of chemistry, particularly the history of chemical affinity.” [1]

In 2001, Fink, in his article “Goethe’s Intensified Border”, as what seems to be a follow up to his earlier note, drew out nine of Goethe’s reactions, including discussion, the way he sees them, among which, curiously, he considers the birth of the child to be a precipitate. [2] The first reaction of Goethe's novella, according to Fink, is a combination reaction, beginning with Charlotte (A) and Eduard (B) being described as being bonded by marriage, where the attachment AB signifies a human chemical bond:

A + B → AB

This changes, according to Fink, with the arrival of the Captain (C), which triggers the second reaction, the Eduard detaching from Charlotte and bonding with his old friend the Captian:

AB + C → A + BC

In c.2003, Libb Thims, having spent the previous eight-years working on the above problem, in terms of Gibbs energy changes and the human reproduction reaction, awoke to the realization, which he had been previously oblivious too (see: Thims history), that the quantitatively measurable "bond energy" in the "-", "=", or "≡" bond, is a key factor in the Gibbs energy change of human chemical reactions, particularly so with respect to mate selection mechanisms; such as follows:

particularly in respect to initial state Gibbs energy and final state Gibbs energy, per reason that once you begin to think about initial state and final state entropies and enthalpies, one begins to the tunnel of a multi-decade rabbit hole of newly opened puzzles.

References
1. Fink, Karl J. (1991). Goethe’s History of Science (elective affinities, pgs. 111, 195). Cambridge University Press.
2. Fink, Karl J. (2002). “Goethe’s Intensified Border”, in Goethe, Chaos, and Complexity (pg. 93-104; elective affinities, pgs. 99-103). Ed. Herbert Rowland (Amsterdam: Rodopi); originally presented as a paper at the Purdue University Symposium “Goethe, Chaos, and Complexity, April 9-10, 1999.