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| A wirdou.com anthropomorphized image (Ѻ) of a valence shell electron breaking loose from its orbital and gaining freedom (see also: free electron). |
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
“The implied ‘correct’ outcome of the human reaction (a simple exchange of partners), which was predicted much like a chemical reaction, is avoided because the Captain is a catalyst and not a normal reactant … [Goethe’s] presentation of the Captain, the wild card in the mix of reactants, saves for humanity the possibility of freedom.”Although Yee's assertion here is incorrect, namely the Captain was not conceived as a catalyst (Mittler the mediator played this roll), but rather as a reactant, we do see mention or discussion of "freedom" in respect to chemical reaction.
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| Rene Magritte’s 1933 painting “Elective Affinities”, characterizes the perspective that although one is born free or may, at times, feel free, one is always “caged” by the force of chemical affinity. |
“Every society, great or small, resembles ... a complex molecule, in which the atoms are represented by men, possessed of all those multifarious attractions and repulsions which are manifested in their desires and volitions, the unlimited power of satisfying which we call freedom ... the social molecule exists in virtue of the renunciation of more or less of this freedom by every individual. It is decomposed, when the attraction of desire leads to the resumption of that freedom the expression of which is essential to the existence of the social molecule. The great problem of social chemistry we call politics, is to discover what desires of mankind may be gratified, and what must be suppressed, if the highly complex compound, society, is to avoid decomposition.”(add discussion)
See main: Chemical Thermodynamics in the Real World; Rossini debateThe topic of freedom, in a similar sense came up again in the famous 1971-2006 Rossini debate between American chemistry professors Harold Leonard, John Wojcik, and Todd Silverstein, on the legitimacy of American chemical thermodynamicist Frederick Rossini’s political thermodynamics arguments, expressed in his 1971 Priestley Medal address “Chemical Thermodynamics in the Real World”, in which Rossini argued that the first and second laws of thermodynamics could be used to understand the paradox between freedom and security in social life, as understood through enthalpy and entropy changes in society, whose central message from his address was: [3]
“The picture we have developed from thermodynamics is very simple: One cannot have a maximum of freedom and a maximum of security at the same time. If there is a maximum of freedom, there will be zero security.”
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| A section from Swedish physical chemist Sture Nordholm's 1997 article “In Defense of Thermodynamics: an Animate Analogy”on human freedom and chemical thermodynamics. [4] |
“To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossibility.”— James Froude (1871), “Calvinism”, Mar 17 [5]
