Saturday, April 28, 2007

It was simply impossible to restrain myself from making some comments after reading of Shida’s blog post. After all, who can ever resist the temptations of making clever analogies? So, lets attempt to understand the secrets of love using a more scientific model.

Do a simple web search, and I think you shall find that it is not a seldom case that love is referred to as the “chemistry” between two human beings of the opposite sex (for the most part of the time, anyway). Yet exactly what kind of chemistry is love?

The most suitable reaction that I know of to compare love to is the formation of an Ionic bond. After we have assumed this postulate of love being the formation of an Ionic bond, it is time to see which parts of our model fits nicely into what happens in real-life “love”.

Firstly it is obvious that an Ionic bond requires two kinds of ions, a Cation and an Anion. In this case, the female fits nicely as the cation, or the metals in the final compound,
while the male takes the place of the anion, or the nonmetals.
Taking a macroscopic view at girls as metals and boys as non-metals, we can see the highly hierarchical and competitive nature of boys compared to girls, as boys, like covalent gases, would try to rise to the top when mixed with each other, while metals don’t really mind being put on top of each other. The mixture of different metals can form alloys in harmless processes, with the girls coexisting quite well, while the mixture of the wrong boys in a group would more often lead to disastrous explosions, just like when we mix oxygen and hydrogen. When it comes to intelligence quotients, it is obvious how girls, like metals, are denser than their male counterparts. It is sad though, that dense girls are often highly, as we see how the some of most expensive metals like gold are extremely dense (think dumb blondes). Also, girls are more reactive and violent at the start of a period, as we can see how alkali metals like sodium or caesium reacts violently with water while nothing much can happen to a piece of copper in water.

Looking at girls as individual atoms, they are more likely to form large networks of friends (rare in the male community). It seems that girls are very close to each other within their community, not unlike the metallic atoms in a sea of electrons in metallic bonding, and generally girls have more friends of a similar gender, preferring to have large numbers of peers. On the other hand, most boys who like to stay in cliques that have little communication and friendship with other cliques (even enmity at times). Isn’t this just like individual covalent molecules with weak van der waals forces between each other? Sometimes boys might get into large groups of “brotherhood”, but such relationships often have a strict hierarchical order, just like diamonds have one carbon atom at the top connected to more and more carbon atoms below, forming a giant covalent molecule.

When true love takes place, it is the merging of two oppositely charged ions to form a stable, neutral in both charge and pH salt. Whether this love will take place will depend on a number of factors, but basically whether the reaction is energetically favourable and kinetically favourable. (Enthalpy comes in!) If a girl or boy is already in a close relationship with a more favourable boyfriend or girlfriend, then the reaction would be energetically unfavourable, since it would take more energy to first break them up than the energy released during the formation of new bonds. This means that if you like a girl who is already with a more suitable guy, you must be really unlucky since most likely you are going to have to stay as free radicals floating about for the rest of your life. If you are more suitable than the guy who the girl is already with, however, there is a chance that you might be able to “steal” away, in a displacement reaction. But this would also mean you might get “displaced” at any moment by someone else. Also, the parties taking in the reaction might have high bond energies, which means the individual reactants are stable kinetically, even though they might be unstable energetically. This is like the two parties having important commitments such as work or school life (or considering them as being more important), and therefore it takes a large amount of energy before the love reaction can take place, even though the two parties might derive more satisfaction from the relationship than their current lives.

Of course, if we talk about chemical reactions we would definitely have to consider reaction rates. Definitely, in a love reaction, microscopically the member atoms must collide effectively before the bond can be formed. If they collide at the wrong angles or too high a velocity, there might be conflicts between the two people and a stable relationship would not follow. If they collide too slowly they might just stay as friends, with only weak id-id or pd-pd reactions between them. Also, macroscopically how well the reaction can take place depends on limiting reactants as well. Generally it is most likely that one of the two reactants is in excess, and the other reactant would be the limiting reagent limiting how far the reagent can go. It doesn’t matter that there is all the chlorine in the world, since if there is no sodium there will be any salt.

In the rare case of a careful titration love from both sides would be of the same amount, and there would be full acceptance of the electrons donated from one side. However this does not necessarily mean that such an effective use of reactants is beneficial, as we can easily see how a careful, clinical approach with proper pippeting and titration techniques being adopted can be really slow, especially when we have to add the titrant drop-wise towards the end of the titration. Constant swirling of the contents of the conical flask can ensure even mixing of the reactants, but its definitely going to take up extra time as well. Furthermore, even though the reaction can be efficient itself, there will be reactants wasted to wash the equipment, just like precious time and energy is lost when one tries to ensure too precise a relationship. The amount of product formed is also extremely small, unlike in an “add both reactants in huge amounts” reaction that can give large amounts of product.


Apparently there are several other descriptions of cation-anion chemistry which applies to love as well, but lets leave those for some other time.