
Left: an Empedoclean-depiction of people separating like oil and water owing to repulsive forces. Right: Generic graphic depicting the separation of differing groups or races, whether natural or forced, a process that can be studied thermodynamically, similar to the way physicists study how atoms in a fluid or solid will separate into a binary alloy, based on energy and entropy determinants.

Left: an Empedoclean-depiction of people separating like oil and water owing to repulsive forces. Right: Generic graphic depicting the separation of differing groups or races, whether natural or forced, a process that can be studied thermodynamically, similar to the way physicists study how atoms in a fluid or solid will separate into a binary alloy, based on energy and entropy determinants.

In human thermodynamics, racial thermodynamics, or "racism thermodynamics", is the study of racism or racial separation or integration from a thermodynamic point of view.

Overview
In 450BC, Greek philosopher Empedocles, theorized that humans were made of mixtures of four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and two forces (attraction, repulsion), as depicted adjacent, and that these act to cause people to separate and or aggregate, similar to the way oil and water will always separate following any sort of mixing, just as will non-mixing types of humans, whereas likes will tend to attract into groups; his popular expression of this being:

“People who love each other mix like water and wine; people who hate each other segregate like water and oil.”

In other words, according to Empedocles, races, i.e. families, tribes, or nations belonging to the same stock, or classes or kinds of people unified by community interests, habits, or characteristics, who hate each other will repel and those that like each other will attract.

In modern terms, when a force moves an object, work is done; and as thermodynamics has established, work can be transformed into heat, and heat transformed into work, and humans are now known to be comprised of 26-elements, technically defined as CHNOPS+22 chemical species.

In 1990, Richard Delgado introduced the term “racial thermodynamics”, in a semi-Empledoclean sense, i.e. that separations or forces of repulsions will always exist, in his view, in his so-called law of racial thermodynamics, an analogy of the conservation of energy, on the idea that the amount of racism, in any society, is always conserved in some way. [2]

In 2002, German physicist Ingo Muller was employing the term “socio-thermodynamics” as the study of racial divisions and separations in society, as discussed in his version of integration and segregation thermodynamics, with focus not necessarily on races, but on religious divisions, e.g. Protestants vs Catholics [3]

In 2005, an American bi-racial (white-black) man, in discussion with American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims, asked: [1]

“Why are white couples more stable than black couples? How does thermodynamics explain this?”

In scientific terms, white couples and black couples would be characteristic of two different types or classifications of dihumanide molecules, i.e. two human molecules bonded in a relationship. Thermodynamically, the nature of chemical bonds between molecules is a factor of enthalpy and entropy determinants. Hence, stability variations in different groups, cultures, or races can thus be studied by entropic and enthalpic quantification methods.

References
1. Thims, Libb. (2007). Human Chemistry (Volume Two) (quote, pg. 637). Morrisville, NC: LuLu.
2. Johnson, Alex M. (2005). “Beyond Higher Education: the Need for African Americans to be ‘Knowledge Producers’”, The Modern American, 1(1), Spring.
3. Müller, Ingo. (2002). Socio-thermodynamics – Integration and Segregation in a Population, P: Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics 14, 384-404, 2002.