“What if we're all just subjects, subordinate / To some higher power's reaction coordinate?”

— Mala Radhakrishnan (2016), Tweet (Ѻ), Dec 21

“When I think of chemistry, I always think of what are the atoms ‘feeling’ on a molecular and atomic level and in a lot of ways, the reactions that they experience are similar to the relationships that people experience.”

“Hope you'll enjoy these chemical notions
Written as poetry in (Brownian?) motion ...”

Tweets	Dissection / Discussion
Parenthood is a happy mess -- / A negative dH and a positive dS. — Mala Radhakrishnan (2013), tweet 7:17 PM Jul 30
And the excess free energy flows Into the children so they grow — Shane Street (2013), reply tweet 7:41 PM Jul 30
Ah, free energy -- that answers the question / Of how my son can be active with so little digestion. — Mala Radhakrishnan (2013), reply tweet 9:13 PM Jul 30
Little activated complexes, there's no question They run downhill in either direction! — Shane Street (2013), reply tweet 9:20 PM Jul 30
Well, now that I've given him his goodnight kiss, / My son sleeps in thermodynamic bliss! — Mala Radhakrishnan (2013), reply tweet 9:24 PM Jul 30

Total				↑↓	Date ------------	Compare / See also --------------------------------------
12	6	6	If elements are like letters, and compounds like words, / Then chemistry's like poetry (especially for us nerds.)		2013 Nov 12
10	7	3	A toddler and fluorine are worth our comparing: / Both small, reactive, and not good at sharing!		2012 Oct 18
7	2	5	Are you ever under so much strain / That you feel like a cyclopropane?		2013 Jul 18
6		6	The strongest of covalent bonds will unfurl, / As we welcome our new little baby girl.		2014 May 29	See: human chemical bond
6	4	2	The chiral lad says, "Though I do fancy her, / I can't bind; she the wrong enantiomer."		2013 Apr 9
5	2	3	Life’s the best metaphor for spectroscopy by far; / By seeing what excites us, we learn who we are!	↑	2012 Dec 4	Compare: “Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” (Howard Thurman, c.1970)
5	3	2	Career paths take decades; think hard at each junction, / 'Cause happiness isn't a state function!		2014 Jun 23	Compare: “Life is a path function. It's the path that you take from the beginning to the end; the integral of that path, that's the special part.” (Christopher Edwards, 2006)
5	4	1	Kinetic control is just all about timin'; / Wait long enough, carbon's no longer a diamond...		2014 Mar 28
4	4		Thermo, kinetics in a wedding vow? / “You’re my Mr. Right!” or “my Mr. Right Now!”	↑↑↑	2012 Dec 13	Compare: the Count's proposal of five-year marriage contract (Ѻ) in Goethe's physicochemical-based Elective Affinities (1809).
4	2	2	What if our free will is just an illusion, / And everything happens through random diffusion?		2014 Jun 16
4	1	3	Just when you can't handle more on your plate, / Your life throws you another transition state.		2014 Jun 12
4	2	2	"I cannot covalently bond with you, / So these van der Waals forces will just have to do ..."		2014 Apr 4
4	3	1	Said red litmus to base, "It's tough bein' with you; / Wherever we go, you make me so blue."		2013 May 29
4	2	2	Social media's like dense noble gases — / We still feel alone as we collide with the masses...		2014 Jan 30
4	2	2	When folks act like fluorine, then this we agree on — / It's best to stay calm and unruffled, like neon.		2014 Jan 23
4	2	2	We lefties are ignored in the design of each fixture, / 'Cause humans are not a racemic mixture.		2013 Oct 2	Ruminate on.
3	2	1	Electrons and little boys, they bear some relation: / 'Cause neither one has a defined location.		2013 Nov 6	See: human molecular orbital; human electron / free electron
3	3		Chemists and artists are similar factions; / Both carefully toil, then await a reaction.		2013 Aug 2
3	1	2	Go runners; I know you'll pass, at a great rate, / The heartbreak hill transition state!		2014 Apr 21
3	2	1	Oh [Red] Sox, how the balls off your bats recoil / Like particles alpha off Rutherford's foil...		2013 Oct 23
2		2	Adults like stability and calm, it's a given. / Children, however, are entropy-driven.		2014 Feb 14
2	1	1	May your love be much stronger than any can fathom, / Dwarfing the bonds between nitrogen atoms [N≡N] .		2014 Feb 14
2	1	1	Nerves? Or fear? Or QM, perhaps? / When my teaching's observed I always "collapse!"		2014 Apr 18	See: wave function collapse
2	2		Be safe; a hurricane makes us see / The power of PV = nRT.		2012 Oct 28
2		2	Of all of our dads are we very much fond; / Thanks for your lasting, covalent bonds.		2014 Jun 15	See: human chemical bond
2	1	1	"Friends or dating?" You answer with hesitance: / "It's complicated — best modeled by resonance ..."		2014 Feb 4	Compare: [10]
2	1	1	I can't surmount the / Activation barrier / For writing haikus...		2014 Mar 1
2		2	He gets to see Santa! My son shows such verve, / But up close, he gets shy ... (like a Lennard Jones curve ...)		2013 Dec 7
2	1	1	Winter is putting your gloves, hat, and coat on, / And at 5PM seeing the sun's last photon ... :(		2013 Nov 13
2	1	1	When it's cold I just wanna curl up in a ball. / (My partition function becomes really small.)		2013 Nov 11
2	1	1	Stay true to your love, if I may say so: / A 1-to-1 stoichiometric ratio ...		2013 Sep 17	● Molar ratios – ChemTeam.info.

Total				↑↓	Date ------------	Compare / See also --------------------------------------
		1	Said a lover to another, all smitten and googly-eyed, / "May a bond forever connect our nuclei!"		2013 Oct 9
		1	Ten years ago he and I became "us." / Our catalyst? Oddly, a Greyhound Bus...!		2013 Dec 1	See: dihumanide molecule; substrate
	1		I'm uncomfortable replacing old with new, / Like a transition state of an SN2 ...		2013 Oct 13
		1	Can't handle more input, 'cause what I do know / Is there's just no more space left in my LUMO.		2014 mar 19	Note: LUMO = lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (compare: HOMO) (Ѻ)
		1	With a newborn, our energy's quite a bit less, / And we all feel a positive Delta S!		2014 Jun 3	See: ΔG > 0
		1	It's Spring Break: time to change your orbital's look, / And at times, have a node at your chemistry book!		2014 Mar 20	See: human molecular orbital theory
		1	Traveling spouse, tough to communicate; / Wish we were a quantum entangled state...		2014 Mar 22
		1	Reducing emotions to chemicals seems tragic, / But to me, the chemistry of love's like magic!		2014 Jun 18
	1		When my son so happily smiles at me, / Then I've globally minimized delta G!		2013 Sep 13
		1	With toddlers, you "pick your battles" to win. / But then you end up in a local min...		2013 Sep 13
	1		“Two roads diverged in a …wood,” Frost wrote, / But if I were an electron, then I would take both!		2012 Nov 8	Compare: Morgan Peck (M. Scott Peck) and his entropy-filled The Road Less Traveled (1978).
	1		Green photon asks red photon, “Hey there, what’s nu?” / “Just four-hundred-fifty terahertz…and you?”		2012 Nov 19
	1		You ever feel like you don’t fit in all that well? / Well, that’s what an electron feels in a valence shell ...		2012 Nov 12
	1		Three toddler boys sharing? Must be an illusion! / (They follow a variant of Pauli Exclusion!)		2012 Nov 24
		1	Stirring a reaction removes all the waiting / By giving reactants a chance at “speed dating.”		2012 Nov 17
	1		A toddler stuck indoors, you ask? / Like a heated gas in a stoppered flask!		2012 Oct 29
	1		Nerdy pick-up line of the eon: / “You excite me like red light does to neon!”		2012 Oct 25
	1		Getting a toddler to finish his rice / Is harder than ionizing hydrogen...twice!		2012 Oct 11
		1	Is your spouse occasionally being a pain? / Like cyclopropane, you've got some "ring strain"!		2014 Jun 28
		1	My son loves new sister, adjusts in his way / To a new steady state (like Le Chatelier?) Though I fear it would be quite a family mess / If (like Le Chatelier) he *opposed* the stress!		2014 Jun 4
		1	I'm kinetically stuck in a paralyzed state; / My chemistry tweets will have to wait...		2014 Mar 6
		1	My son's free energy's never deficient, / By his high activity coefficient!		2014 Mar 1
	1		Use caution online, 'cause it's not an illusion: / What you say can spread faster than random diffusion!		2014 Feb 28
		1	Doing what's fast (not what's best) takes its toll, / But sometimes I'm under kinetic control...		2014 Feb 22
		1	To TV are my son's eyes glued, of course, / With the strength of the strong nuclear force ...		2014 Feb 12	See: human chemical bond / electromagnetic force
		1	Reworking a paper for resubmission / Is somewhat like tweaking reaction conditions...		2014 Jan 21
		1	You'd think that with temperatures being so low, / My life would get stable and ordered ... but no.		2014 Jan 9	See: third law of thermodynamics
		1	My son's jigsaw puzzle I see on the floor, / And I'm reminded of a hydrophobic core.		2013 Nov 25
		1	My son's love for kinetics, it leaves me quite weary. / With toy cars, he studies "collision theory"...		2013 Nov 15
	1		Love at first sight is a potent allusion / To reactions limited but by diffusion ...		2013 Nov 7
	1		"Expressing my love, how close can I get? / I'd need an infinite basis set ..."		2013 Oct 8	● Basis set (chemistry) – Wikipedia.
	1		Our government should learn from ionic bond-making: / Opposites partner through giving and taking.		2013 Oct 6
		1	Multitasking is something I hate, / In a superposition of eigenstates!		2013 Oct 2
	1		When art meets science, it's truly phenomenal. / So let's stop thinking that they are orthogonal.		2013 Sep 26	See: Alec Groysman
	1		Quantum mechanics is simple, you see; / It's as easy as (n equals) 1, 2, 3!		2013 Sep 24
	1		It's tough to relax my son for his slumber, / To lower his principal quantum number...		2013 Sep 22

Total				↑↓	Date ------------	Compare / See also --------------------------------------
			In life we all have a simple purpose: / To explore our potential energy surface.		2013 Sep 4	Funny!
			Ignorance is bliss, 'cause you sit with a grin, / Unaware that you're just in a *local* min.		2013 Nov 25
			My first gray hair ... the imposition / Of a slow, unwanted phase transition ...		2013 Oct 31	See: Henry Adams
			The events in our life we consider fantastic / Are not planned or determined, but are often stochastic ...		2013 Oct 27	Ruminate on.
			Happy New Year; may you reach a new low / Of your free energy; may your happiness grow!		2014 Jan 1	[??]
			One's love for another cannot be undone, / Like two wavefunctions linked and convolved into one...		2014 Feb 14
			...And I reach such thermodynamic bliss / By giving my sweet little daughter a kiss!		2014 Jun 26	Re "thermodynamic bliss", see: pg. 90. [1]
			Go Red Sox – how awesome a game is this? / You bring us such thermodynamic bliss.		2013 Sep 4	Ditto (per above)
			It's instinct -- such negative delta G / To smile back when my newborn "gas-smiles" at me!		2014 Jun 26
			Here's a lesson from metallic reactions: / Stay *positive* in all of your interactions!		2014 Jun 21
			Finding love and good friends are stochastic missions; / Just try hard and hope for productive collisions!		2014 Mar 30	See: collision theory
			Warm weather increases each rate of reaction - / My son quickly took his nap - no distraction!		2014 Apr 12	Compare: Q&A (segment: 44:00-47:15), of 16 Apr NIU lecture,
			Spring cleanin' this weekend? No way, I'll be livin'! / The weather's so warm I'll be entropy-driven!		2014 Apr 11
			Social media may increase collisions, / But each encounter sees less fruition...		2014 Jun 19	See: collision theory
			Some paths aren't reversible — no turning back — / Like the coordinate that captures the tenure track ...		2014 Mar 13	Compare: “I did not embark on experiments on consciousness in alert people until after I had obtained the security of academic tenure.” (Benjamin Libet, c.1990)
			Decisions would cause less trepidation / Under many worlds interpretation ...		2014 Jun 6	See: human quantum mechanics
			Stability's what diverse friendship brings; / Be like carbon and bond to multiple things!		2014 Mar 1
			Congrats to the grads — your future awaits, / With newly accessible microstates!		2014 May 30	See: S = k ln W
			Stay balanced — the secret to life, they say; / Keep trying to get Q to equal your K.		2014 Apr 23	Note: If Q > K, then there are more products present than equilibrium and the reaction will produce more reactants shifting the reaction to the left. If Q > K, then there are more reactants present than equilibrium and the reaction will produce more products shifting the reaction to the right. If Q = K, then the reaction is already at equilibrium and there will be no shift. (Ѻ)
			It's Spring, and my son goes outdoors with gumption / And boosted translational partition function!		2014 Apr 3
			It might be rough; few things may seem bleaker, / But stay afloat - don't precipitate out of the beaker.		2014 Feb 24	Compare: “I have almost finished your book, which I really enjoyed by the way. I can agree with the adult-adult bond; however, I tend to view the child as a possible product or precipitate, not as additional bond. I am coming from a mechanical engineering background, so my vantage point is different. I tend to see life, learning, and relationships as Carnot cycle type events.” (Melanie, 2009) (Ѻ)
			All this snow - I'm sick of it! / Its chemical potential — infinite!!		2014 Feb 18	??
			My spouse, a year older? Let's fix the confusion. / Birthdays, they quantize time — an illusion...		2014 Feb 9
			The better team? Well, you do the math... / Which one has the greater mean free path?		2014 Feb 2	Compare: William Ramsay’s 1898 ‘football players’ explanation of kinetic theory, wherein the players are likened to a ‘throng of human molecules’.
			Can kids feel eclipsed by a sibling that's new, / Like a leaving group made by a swift SN2 ...?		2014 Jul 1
			Now that my week's work is all done, / I'm on couch; my partition function is one!		2014 Jan 31
			In auto-pilot by my own admission; / My days have periodic boundary conditions ...		2014 Jan 28	??
			Your finals are done. May your days now be merrier; / Congrats on surpassing the energy barrier!		2013 Dec 20	See: activation energy
			Just aimlessly seeking my best — know the feeling? / 'Cause life's just a run of simulated annealing ...		2013 Nov 7	● Simulated annealing – Wikipedia.
			Patience: required with kids, but the wait / Can be quite an unstable transition state!		2013 Oct 5	See: Mirza Beg
			Perhaps we'd unite and we'd see beyond borders / By modeling all people to only first order.		2013 Sep 19	??
			Entropy's got me feelin' encumbered / By fatalist laws of very large numbers ...		2013 Sep 3	What?
			Our vacation will make the whole family merrier, / But packing's a really big energy barrier ...		2013 Aug 22
			If our energy's low but high pressure we feel, / Then, just like a gas, things won't be ideal.		2013 Aug 22
			Now all that *our* love lives should need is patience / (and our own personalized Schrodinger equations!).		2013 Aug 19	See: Moriarty-Thims debate (comments: #11, #18, etc.)
			How neat that molecular romantic relations / Can be modeled by partial differential equations!	↑↑↑	2013 Aug 19
			Your core group of friends will stay with you through hell. / The rest of your friends are your valence shell.		2013 Aug 19
			Life is like chem; the goal's to be able / To bond well with others so we can be stable.		2013 Aug 17	See: chemical teleology

Total				Date ------------	Compare / See also --------------------------------------
	2		Cleaning is futile. Denial's a flaw. / There's no use in fighting the second law.	2013 Sep 21	This is what is called thermodynamic folklore. Nowhere in The Mechanical Theory of Heat does it state that rooms become messy because of the second law.
			Your choices to no one should e'er be subordinate, / 'Cause you should control your reaction coordinate!	2013 Sep 21	This one has issues galore; Goethe, e.g., devoted what he referred to as his "best book" to this subject, even naming the title cryptically (see: title decoding) as such: Die Wahlverwandtschaften [≡] The Choice [of one's] Electives [or] Attractions [to things or people] We do, however, see Radhakrishnan, to her credit, recanting towards correctness in 2014, per tweet reform, see: “free will” section (below).
2	1	1	What's the state function that's best for my measure? / It's enthalpy ... (I'm under constant pressure).	2013 Sep 23	Incorrect (but close): the state function for earth-bound freely-running reactions is free energy; this is because they occur in isothermal and isobaric reaction conditions. This was explicitly explained by Lewis in 1923; see: human free energy (theorists). Regarding the general query: “whoever said state functions apply to humans?” (JHT potentials), see: Moriarty-Thims debate (2009), e.g. comments: #128, #160, etc.; The Literate Engineer's Jun 2005 comment (in Libb Thims (attack)); and also: Ilya Prigogine’s 1977 Nobel Lecture “obviously” comment.
	1		My son loves his noodles, but rather than eat 'em, / He explores their vibrational degrees of freedom.	2013 Oct 1	Dumb.
			My brain can't accept your contribution. / (It's officially a saturated solution...)	2013 Oct 11	Sounds off?
4	1	3	The perfect lecture, paper, or rhyme? / The limiting reactant is always ... time.	2014 Feb 6	Correct: time is not, technically, a limiting reactant; only a chemical species can be such.
2	1	1	Some call it "hump day", but as chemists, we say, / "It's Wednesday, the energy barrier day!"	2013 Nov 20
2		2	My productivity I'd like to keep, / But the limiting reactant now ... is sleep!	2014 Jun 5	Correct: sleep is not, technically, a limiting reactant; only a chemical species can be such.
2		2	Thank you, Enya — best catalyst by far / For getting my son off to sleep in the car ...	2014 Mar 21	Note: something seems amiss in this fragment; to the effect that a person who gets someone to fall asleep, say by singing a lullaby, does not seem to be an actual “catalyst”, such as how Goethe (1809) defined Mittler, the mediator, as the facilitator of marriage reactions; how Johann Dobereiner discovered (1823) that platinum (the “catalyst”) sponge could cause the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen at room temperature, a process he referred to as “contact action”, later to be called “catalysis” by Jacob Berzelius (1835); or how American chemical engineer Scott Fogler, in his 1992 Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering, argues that a person who starts a riot and then ducks out before things get violent would be an example of a human catalyst: [11] “A catalyst is a substance that affects the rate of a reaction but emerges from the process unchanged. A man inciting a mob to riot and then ducking out before the tanks roll in can be regarded as a catalyst.” See: human catalyst
			In catalyzing my son's naps, I am the worst; / 'Cause during the process, I fall asleep first!	2014 Feb 2	Ditto (per above)
3	2	1	Some opportunities aren't to be missed. / So go for it – be your own catalyst.	2014 Sep 8	A molecule cannot be its own catalyst; this seems to be put self-help nonsense.
		1	The contents of baby's colon and bladder — / They violate conservation of matter!	2014 Jun 26	Correction: there is no law "violations" in or between humans, e.g. violations of the second law, or energy conservation violations, etc..
			O, thermal equilibrium, take hold at last — / Please bring me some heat from Alaska real fast ...	2014 Jan 24	Something seems amiss here [?]
			Changing son's outfit requires a wait / Through his half-naked high energy transition state...	2013 Nov 10
			On couch and watching the Sox on TV; / I've achieved my minimum delta G!	2013 Sep 7	Something doesn't make sense here??

What if our free will is just an illusion, /
And everything happens through random diffusion?

— Mala Radhakrishnan (2014), Jun 16 (4 votes)

Classical, quantum — both give me a chill, /
'Cause both do imply that I have no free will ...

— Mala Radhakrishnan (2014), Feb 1 (0 votes)

What if our free will were just an illusion, /
Our "trajectories" laid out by steered diffusion?

— Mala Radhakrishnan (2014), Jan 21 (0 votes)

Your choices to no one should e'er be subordinate, /
'Cause you should control your reaction coordinate!

— Mala Radhakrishnan (2013), Sep 21 (0 votes)

Morally-neutral (legal)		Immoral? (illegal)
KF2		MF2
Left: the space-fill model of the molecule krypton difluoride (Ѻ), which, according to Radhakrishnan, is a happy atomic threesome, formed via covalent bonds; a legal bond according to the laws of chemistry. Right: an image of a Washington man married to two women, i.e. a trihumanide molecule, which is illegal under federal and state laws. (Ѻ) The so-called moral or ethical nature of marriage has recently been a topic of debate, particularly in regards to same sex marriage, many recoiling back to Biblical views to find their bearings. (Ѻ) To cite one recent position, arrived at by three scholars: (Ѻ) “We must guard against attempting to use ancient texts to regulate modern ethics and morals, especially those ancient texts whose endorsements of other social institutions, such as slavery, would be universally condemned today, even by the most adherent of Christians.” Here, Radhakrishnan would seem to concur and advocate for the use of the physical chemistry texts, over that ancient texts, to regulate modern ethics and morals, a position argued by Goethe some 200 years ago.

“It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am.But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband.But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.”

An excerpt from Radhakrishnan’s poem “The Foiling Point of Water”, comparing the boiling points between methanol CH4O and water H2O, wherein one can sense the Dr. Suess flow of presentation. [6]

“I really try to humanize atoms and molecules”.

A comparative illustration of “dancing molecules” from English chemist Maxwell Eidinoff’s 1947 book Atomics for the Millions, in which, similar to Radhakrishnan, he employs analogy and or realism for illustrative teaching purposes. [4]	Cover to Radhakrishnan's 2001 Atomic Romances, Molecular Dances which uses poetry and anthropomorphic chemistry illustrations to teach chemistry and physical chemistry concepts. [1]