Above: a annotated version of American computational chemist David Hwang's 2001 article "The Thermodynamics of Love", wherein he defines people chemically as "elements" (see: human chemical element), couples as "compounds", and the process of falling in love as a chemical reaction that is quantified and governed via Gibbs free energy changes, from Libb Thims' 2015 Zerotheism for Kids lecture (part two). [1] |
M + F → M-F
Hwang's free energy plots verse extent of reaction, showing stable products (top) and unstable products (bottom). |
See main: Thermodynamics of loveIn the 1950s, Iranian mechanical engineer Mehdi Bazargan is said to have penned an article entitled "Thermodynamics of Love"; possibly still only available in Farsi.
1. Thermochemical Approach to Relationships
2. Complex Equilibria of Men and Women
3. Reaction Kinetics
4. Neutron Scattering: A Cautionary Tale
5. The Shell Model
“We live in a world of relationships: from chemical bonds to boy meets girl, to families and societies, to the laws that govern the cosmic order. The trilogy is a typical love story. Indeed, boy meets girl and a relationship develops, but we all know that as Woody Allen says ‘Sooner or later everything turns to sh*t.’ In other words, in most relationships, the initial dynamic exchange of heat-energy soon becomes the dreaded lukewarm entropy, harbinger of heat death. However, the physics that seem to doom David and Kate’s relationship to the thermodynamic trap, might be able to help them to transform it into the everlasting loop of energy exchange they have always dreamed of: a superconductive love unmarred by friction from guilt, fear and resentment. Their quest will force them to challenge, and eventually transcend their all too human feelings of inadequacy, the apparently inevitable limitations of time, and the hazy, illusory lines between dream and reality, life and death.”
“The thermodynamics of computation, if anyone had stopped to wonder about it, would probably have seemed no more urgent as a topic than, say, the thermodynamics of love.”
— Charles Bennett (1988), “Notes on the History of Reversible Computation” [4]
“The big ideas in heat are the laws of thermodynamics. So important and far-reaching are the laws of thermodynamics that some people try to use them to explain what governments should do, why people fall in love, and why there are car wrecks.”See also— Bill Nye (1993), American mechanical engineer [5]