User:JWSchmidt/HM

poster indicating that there are 7x109 (seven-billion) human elements (people) on the Earth  ]] The term human molecule is the definition of a person when defined from the view of atomic composition and reactions between people ("human chemistry"). 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. In this book, C.G. Darwin argued that the human being is, in fact, a molecule who evolves according to the laws of chemistry and that man's future, over the next million years, could be predicted by statistical thermodynamics.

Historically, since the time of Goethe, with his 1809 scientific novella Elective Affinities, who argued that humans were chemical species governed by the laws of chemical affinity, to the present, this point of view, in which humans are molecules, for some, has been a source of debate. In Goethe's time, the central question surrounded the issue of free will. In modern times, the issue revolves around whether the human is a molecule or not and whether bulk human actions can be predicted statistically. In the 2005 article "I Am Not A Molecule", for instance, writer Steve Fuller highlights the debate between authors such as Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate), Jared Diamond (Collapse), and Philip Ball (Critical Mass), who argue that mass human behavior can be studied similar to the statistical views of James Maxwell who studied the average behavior of large number of molecules, as this clashes with the views of social scientists.

Precursory concepts
The concept of the "human molecule" is a view of human life built on the shoulders of many historical antecedents. The first to theorize in this direction was the French mathematical philosopher Rene Descartes who both coined the term "molecule" and in his 1637 Discourse on Method situated the mechanistic concept of the automaton or animal machine, which, in his own words, is "incomparably better ordered and more admirable in its movements than any of those which can be invented by men." In connection to the idea of animal machines, in 1698 English mechanical engineer Thomas Savery built the first mechanical engine. Shortly thereafter, predominately during the 19th century, Descartes' animal machine was dramatically transformed into the concept of the human motor in which the human body and the industrial machine were both viewed as motors having a similar function, which is to convert energy into mechanical work.

In the years to follow, the science of chemistry began to come into its own and the theory of the human motor began to find reconciliation with the reality of the atoms, molecules, the periodic table, and chemical reactions. The human body and the industrial machine were both motors that converted energy into mechanical work, but the latter was made of primarily the element iron whereas the former was comprised of a more diversified blend of elements, twenty-six to be exact. This new atomic understanding of the human body, however, was not immediate.

In 1813, to cite one example, British chemist and physicist Humphry Davy compared man to a point atom. By 1818, Swedish chemist Jöns Berzelius had determined atomic weights for forty-five of the 49 accepted elements. In 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev famously arranged the total 66 elements known at the time into a periodic table, listed in order of atomic weights, in such a manner that their properties repeated in a series of periodic intervals. Mendeleyev's table, shown adjacent, and its modern predecessors, are now ubiquitous within the academic discipline of chemistry, providing an extremely useful framework to classify, systematize and compare all the many different forms of chemical behavior of the elements in their periodic intervals:

In the early 20th century, 81 chemical elements were known. It soon became apparent, in a slow gradualistic manner, that human beings were composed of variations of these elements. In 1914, American naval engineer William Fairburn, in his book Human Chemistry, postulated that each chemical element in some way has relationship to different types of personalities. Fairburn argued that each human being is in fact a human chemical and that just as many laboratory chemicals are purified by fire, others by water, and still others by the influence of chemicals acting upon them, then so to would human chemicals become purified in the laboratory of life. Thus, according to Fairburn, there are some human chemicals (people) that are developed by contact with other human chemicals, such that association with proper people will round those lives and infinitely increase their reaction possibilities and potentialities for usefulness.

In 1919, similar to Goethe, American physician George W. Carey, in his book The Chemistry of Human Life, not only proposed that human life abides by the laws of chemical affinity but was the first to propose that "man's body is a chemical formula in operation". Interestingly, at the time only 78 elements were known and many of these were not known to function in the human body. In regards to human nature, according to Carey, "there can be but one law of chemical operation in vegetable or animal organisms ... when man understands and cooperates with that life chemistry, he will have solved the problem of physical existence."

In the years to follow, the function of each element in the body began to be discerned and it became more apparent that the human being may in fact be a large "reactive molecule".

C.G. Darwin's human molecule
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." In 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.

Human 26-element molecular formula
In modern terms, with 118 known elements, the average "human molecular formula" contains approximately 26 functional elements, as shown below:

In the human body, each element has a specific function. The top 5 elements by percent mass and their function are shown below:

In human chemistry, the supposition of the existence of a "human chemical bond" between human molecules and the conception of "human chemical reactions", quantified by terms such as energy, entropy, work, spontaneity, etc., between people is the central topic. Interestingly, according to online polls, about 56 percent of people agree that they are a large molecule.

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. 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. Müller's take, however, is more accurate from a thermodynamic point of view.

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.

21st century applications
In the 2000s, this "human molecule system" issue is still a fervent topic. 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". This has led to articles such as "I am not a molecule", but for social scientists, the very notion of ceasing to analyze the behavior of individuals is an affront based on defunct 19th-century social science.

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.

In the 2007 two-volume book Human Chemistry, building on the view that humans are reactive molecules that evolve according to a Gibbs free energy minimization principle, American chemical engineer Libb Thims argues that intimate relationships and the work output produced therefrom, as well as other basic aspects, e.g. reaction spontaneity, reaction rate, bond energy, etc., can be predicted or calculated quantitatively similar to other types of substrate-attached reactions, such as the Haber process.

Related
Other applications include the construction and modeling of human-like molecules that can perform basic human tasks, such as walking, driving, or carrying load. In September 2005, for example, a research team led by Ludwig Bartel at the University of California Riverside designed a molecule that walks over a surface like a human, i.e. a walking molecule. The molecule, 9,10-dithioanthracene or “DTA”, has two linkers that act as feet. With a source of thermal energy, the molecule moves such that only one of the linkers is lifted from the surface while the other stabilizes the molecule and guides its motion. By alternating its two feet, the nano-walker is able to move over atomic surfaces without the assistance of nano-rails or atomic-groves.

of a nanocar driving on an atomic-surface]]

Similarly, in October 2005, researchers at Rice University designed the world's first molecular car. With a wheelbase of less than 5 nm, the tiny atom-sized car was driven on a gold-plated microscopic highway. The wheels were buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms a piece. According to these researchers, this "nanocar" represents the first step towards molecular manufacturing.

In 2007, building on the walking molecule, i.e. a molecule that can walk in a straight line on a flat surface, which was one of American Institute of Physic's "Top 25 Physics Stories for 2005", UC Riverside's Ludwig Bartels and his team, found a way to attach cargo: two CO2 molecules, making their nano-walker a molecule carrier. "Carrying a load slows the molecule down" explained Bartels. "Attachment of one CO2 molecule makes the carrier need twice as much energy for a step, and a carrier with two CO2s requires roughly three times the energy. This is not unlike a human being carrying heavy loads in one or both hands." Bartels explained that using machines at the scale of single molecules will ultimate be the most efficient way to build objects or to deliver material.

Quotes
We may, so to speak, reasonably hope to find the Boyle's law which controls the behavior of those very complicated molecules, the members of the human race, and from this we should be able to predict something of man's future.
 * --Charles Galton Darwin, Historian (1952)

People are just like particles – they behave in groups as if they were molecules in a test tube.
 * -–Book: Milton's Progress (1999)

They're just well-formed molecules.
 * -–Movie: Shallow Hal (2001)