“The website was written approximately 10-years ago, but it has not been published in any journal. 10-15 years ago, I had a cooperation with a high school in Darmstadt. One focus of that cooperation was to bring different fields of teaching together. At that time Goethe’s novel ‘affinities’ was discussed in the German class and the 16-year-old pupils watched an Italian movie on Goethe’s novel. The chemical aspects in that novel were discussed in the chemistry class and analogies between chemical interactions and human interactions, especially love, were worked out. The text which I put onto my website is the result of that class, a class report, so to say. A few years later I was involved in a similar project which had the focus on science and religion.”

An advertisement for the 1996 film Le affinità elettive, the French-Italian rewrite of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, which was used as a teaching medium in 1999 high school chemistry class that Wiskamp took part in, which resulted in the 2002 article “Chemistry in the Work of Goethe”, an overview of the chemical thermodynamics of human relationships. [1]

“Edward introduces the concept of elective affinities between chemicals. He means that substances then obviously preferable to one another, particularly when a lot of latent heat is released. The thermodynamic sense, Edward speaks of enthalpy of formation, ΔH, especially the exothermic (hot love) chemical reactions. Charlotte finds that a chemical reaction takes place only when the opportunity arises. It compares that there is theft only if there is something to steal, and also handy for the thief is ready. It describes so clearly that the position of a chemical equilibrium depends crucially on the concentrations of the reactants (mass action). Extremely formulated: Come marble not contacted with sulfuric acid, so there are neither gypsum nor carbon dioxide; Otto and Ottilie were not published, the marriage of Charlotte and Edward would not have been compromised. Maybe thinks Charlotte, when she speaks of occasions, other boundary conditions, which can change a marriage, for example, homely, financial, medical or social, similar to e.g. the temperature on the rate of a chemical reaction and the setting of the chemical equilibrium has a significant influence. Otto says that is the course of a chemical reaction by a higher purpose.

The chemist knows that the driving force of a chemical reaction by the Otto speaks, on the one hand depends on the heat of reaction (exothermic or endothermic), on the other hand but also of temperature and entropy of a measure of the disorder of the system, after the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the system strives toward a maximum, with the motto: the chaos is increasing.

The reaction of calcium carbonate with sulfuric is entropy-controlled especially because with the carbon (IV) oxide is a reaction product escapes from the mixture (chaotic) in the disordered gas phase. Even with the mutual relations of the four main characters in his novel all ends in chaos. Now the behavior of calcium carbonate and sulfuric acid is fully with the relationship between Charlotte, Edward, Otto and Ottilie comparable? If so, do adultery as the most natural thing in the world and are considered practically the above-cited law of science meet. But Charlotte is really a soulless carbonation, Edward etc. a soulless calcium? Are not the self-re-fall in love and committing adultery not only solved with old friends and new ones and creates a lot of chaos, but also feelings of hurt people? Therefore need not even be considered laws that go beyond the purely scientific? For example, those who long ago brought an old man of the mountain and down the sixth of which is: Thou shalt not commit adultery! Goethe asks this question in his novel also. Describe the natural sciences with its laws is the only truth, or are there other levels of reality, we only guess, but (still) do not know?”

See also: Homework problems; Human thermodynamics education