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Human chemistry is the description of the interactions between people with the same language that is employed in traditional chemistry. The people are viewed as "human molecules" or "chemical species", analogies are drawn to the concepts of energy, entropy, and work that quantify chemical process.

The first book titled "human chemistry", with the implicit assumption that humans are reactive chemical species, was that written in 1914 by American naval engineer William Fairburn. The view that each person is a “human molecule”, whose interpersonal reactions can be predicted according to statistical thermodynamics, was put forward in 1952 by English physicist C.G. Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin in his book The Next Million Years. Central to this process is the supposition of the existence of a human chemical bond, "A≡B", that can be quantified by terms such as bond energy, bond length, and bond strength.

Fairburn's human chemistry
's 1914 book Human Chemistry]] The first book on "human chemistry", with the implicit assumption that humans are reactive species, quantified by energy and entropy, was that written in 1914 American marine engineer William Fairburn. Working life, according to Fairburn, is such that the foreman of the factory is a "human chemist" whose job is to "produce every combination, activity or power needed in his business, industrial life, or departmental work, and he must know how properly to combine and use the various (human) elements in order that the greatest achievement may result through unnecessary fatigue and wasteful reaction or from combustion caused by friction and explosiveness." Moreover, "he should be able to read and analyze his men just as the chemist can tell the contents of his bottles. He should know the characteristics of individual and classify them according to deductions obtained from scientific observations rather than draw conclusions from general appearances." The energies of these actions, according to Fairburn, are quantified by personal energies and entropies.

In particular, according to Fairburn, one of "the most vital problems" in life concerns the placement of the right person in the right job, whether one works for others or employs people to work for them. In this manner, the central objective of manager "in his intelligent planning and utilization of their efforts individually and in combination", is that "the the greatest efficiency and harmony, and therefore the greatest happiness, may prevail. All men, according to Fairburn, "are like chemical elements in well-stocked laboratory, and the manager, foreman, or handler of men, in his daily work, may be considered as the chemist."  The primary objective of the employer, in Fairburn's view, is a thorough knowledge of the characteristics and temperament of each individual, so to obtain:

the reactions resulting from the combinations of individuals

The principle work of the chemist then, according to Fairburn, "is analysis and synthesis". Moreover, "a human chemist is required to separate systems compounded by non-scientific methods into their constituent human chemical elements, and then with a definite, preconceived plan, compound these individuals, in the proper relative proportions, into an organization, both harmonious and effective for performing the desired function."

C.G. Darwin's human molecules
The first recorded use of the term "human molecule", was made by Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin, in his terse 1952 book The Next Million Years. The purpose of this book, as he states, is to reasonably predict the history of the world and particularly human kind for the next million years.

In the system of gas molecules, the external conditions are determined by the constraints of the containing vessel; the analogy for humans, according to Darwin, is that the earth itself is the containing vessel. Similarly, the internal conditions of human systems, which are analogous to the property of being conservative dynamical systems, lies, as Darwin says, "of course much deeper". It must depend on, according to Darwin, "the laws governing the nature and behavior of the human molecules." He continues, "the reader may feel that this is a bad analogy, because unlike a molecule, a man has a free will, which makes his actions unpredictable." The issue as to whether man has a "free will", however, is a point of contention. This was a central issue in Goethe's Elective Affinities. The following quote by Goethe summarizes his view: "none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

Using statistical thermodynamics as a basis, C.G. Darwin argues that one should be able to predict human interactions similar to how the "behavior" of gas molecules are determined. With the statistical laws, according to Darwin, we are able to work out the details of what happens when two molecules collide, whereas for larger systems of molecules we use the ideal gas laws, such as Boyle's law, which relates pressure to volume, to predict their behavior. To derive Boyle’s law, according to Darwin, all that is required is the knowledge that the molecules constitute what is technically called a conservative dynamical system. This name, as he states, is derived from the fact that the total energy of two colliding molecules is conserved. In other words, in the reactive system, the total internal energy stays constant during the collision or its differential equals the work exchanged with the surroundings during an adiabatic process (a process with no boundary heat flow).

Next, Darwin states that, in addition to internal nature of the dynamical system of molecules, which depends on the conservative nature of the interactions, there are also external conditions, such as pressure and volume, which must be accounted for. To determine these, he states that scientists measure factors such as the size of containing vessel and the force with which the molecule push on the walls of the containing vessel. In this manner, if the internal and external conditions of reactive systems of human molecules can be determined, then so to can their behavior.

Next, Darwin states that, in addition to internal nature of the dynamical system of molecules, which depends on the conservative nature of the interactions, there are also external conditions, such as pressure and volume, which must be accounted for. To determine these, he states that scientists measure factors such as the size of containing vessel and the force with which the molecule push on the walls of the containing vessel. In this manner, if the internal and external conditions of reactive systems of human molecules can be determined, then so to can their behavior.

Müller's human molecular thermodynamics
In the early 1990s, Venezuelan chemical engineer Erich Müller, a reader (professor) in thermodynamics at the Imperial College London, to enlighten his lectures and to get his students interested, began to compare people to molecules. Muller does not mean this literally, a recent interview explains:

"Dr Müller hopes his analogies will not be taken too seriously: 'Obviously people are much more complicated than molecules—cartoon science is just a way to help someone understand something.."

In 1998, in an article entitled "Human Societies: a Curious Application of Thermodynamics", Müller first defined humans to be analogous to molecules, then quantified inter human molecular love and hate in terms of basic thermodynamic pair bonds, and the lastly quantified social forces as a type of van der Waals dispersion force. Müller was not the first to suggest this type of theory, yet he was the first to state such an outline accurately, with examples, and in terms of thermodynamic potentials and in quantum electromagnetic terms. A similarly themed article, for example, is Elias Khalil's 1995 American Journal of Economics and Sociology paper "Nonlinear Thermodynamics and Social Science Modeling: Fad Cycles, Cultural Development, and Identification Slips", which argues that, owing to the effects of entropy, individuals in social systems are similar to molecules and that ‘there is a tendency for adjacent individuals to be pulled toward an equilibrium state’, e.g. such as found in group memberships, societies, cities, etc.

As Müller explains, for both humans and molecules, close proximity between molecules results in a state of "repulsion", intermediate proximity results in a state of "attraction", and at large distances, both humans and molecules do not interact directly and the potential is effectively zero. To give an example, Müller discusses the behavior of individuals at a party. As the guests enter the room, "the first thing they do, after serving themselves a drink, is to mingle, wandering without direction." Müller continues, "the place themselves at judicious distances, not too close but not too far away, from others—a distance corresponding to the minimum of the interhuman potential. If we attempt to get too close to an individual, there will be an inherent repulsion."

Müller reasoned that just as basic statistical thermodynamics, which is the study of the microscopic behaviors of thermodynamic systems using probability theory, predicts macroscopic behaviors of systems through knowledge of intermolecular interactions and appropriate averaging among the large number of molecules that constitute a system, that, in human social terms, if we can come to understand the collective behavior of the system we then comprehend the interactions on an individual basis. Using this logic, together with the concept of "potentials" from classical thermodynamics, he explains how social interactions are functions of quantum electrostatics and thermodynamics. In 2006, Müller was interviewed about his use of human molecular metaphors and analogies in lecture, where he explained that it keeps the topic interesting to students.

Critical Mass
In the 2004 book Critical Mass, winner of the 2005 Aventis prize for popular science writing, British physical chemist Philip Ball sets out to show "how much we can understand about human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions".

21st century applications
In 2006, Russian physical chemist Georgi Gladyshev, in his International Journal of Molecular Sciences article titled "The Principle of Substance Stability is Applicable to all Levels of Organization of Living Matter" argues that the conception of people as "molecules" agrees with basic thermodynamic evolution tendencies, in that people who react together personally, socially, and economically do so in accordance with a principle of substance stability and the Gibbs free energy minimization tendency of evolution, which states that:

Under the action of the sun's energy, substances which are thermodynamically stable in the early conditions of the earth are transformed into the various products of photosynthesis, those transformations being regulated by thermodynamic principles. During this process, from the resulting products only those stable suprastructures are selected which correspond to minimum states of the free energy of a biosystem.

Affinity and free energy
Max Weber and others proposed the view that humans are driven by the force of chemical affinity.

In 1978, in opposition to Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structure theory, Russian physical chemist Georgi Gladyshev, in a Journal of Theoretical Biology article titled "On the Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution", positioned the view that human interactions can be quantified through chemical means and that evolution is governed by the tendency for quasi-closed temporal earth bound dynamical systems to configure towards Gibbs free energy minimums. This logic was expanded upon in the 1998 book Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings, which positioned a type of "sociological thermodynamics" where human interactions are energetically regulated by the combined law of thermodynamics.