In human chemistry, the origin of the American chemical engineer Libb Thims' 2007, 824-page textbook Human Chemistry, stems from his curiosity, beginning in the early 1990s, as to how one would use the "spontaneity criterion" of chemical thermodynamics to predict the basic human reproduction reaction, in which a man and a women collide in time and chemically react, over the average extent of 15-years, to create a new child:

Man + Woman → Child

to determine reaction feasibility, such as if one were to choose between three potential mates.

Overview
In 1995, while sitting in a chemical engineering thermodynamics class at the University of Michigan, American Libb Thims felt the impulse to raise his hand in class and ask how basic Gibbs free energy reaction prediction calculations of the "spontaneity criterion" for spontaneous reactions:

ΔG < 0 signifies a spontaneous (energetically favored) reaction
ΔG > 0 signifies a non-spontaneous reaction (one that would require energy)

would apply to calculations of mating reactions between humans, particularly referring to dating, marriage, and reproduction variations of human chemical reactions. This question may have been stimulated into inception, in the mind of Thims, by the newly published 1994 book The Evolution of Desire – Strategies of Human Mating, which Thims had recently begun reading. In short, how does one use chemical thermodynamics to explain the evolution of desire; from the desire of two hydrogen atoms H to attach together (H2), a process that began occuring 13.7 billion years ago, to the evolved state of the desire of two human molecules H to attach together(H2), a process that began occuring 150,000 years ago?

In other words, in chemistry, a calculation of ΔG < 0, for a given hypothetical reaction between chemical species, signifies a “spontaneous” or feasible reaction, meaning that the reaction would go on its own, proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency without external constraint or extra energy input. Thims wanted to know how this was done for humans. For whatever reason, however, Thims held his tongue.

Instead, over the next six years, Thims kept the problem in the back of his head, and from time-to-time tried to figure it out on scratch paper and readings of potentially related works. The basic problem, as Thims saw it during these years, was to figure out how the ubiquitous basic human reproduction:

A + B → C

in which A and B are the reactants (the dating pair) and C is the product (a 15-year old child) could be predicted using the standard Gibbs free energy equation:

ΔG = ΔH – TΔS

supposing that person A was to be hypothetically paired up with three potential mates (B, D, E):

A + B → Child

A + D → Child

A + E → Child

In short, how would one use the logic of chemical thermodynamics and its ability to predict reactions to help them determine who they should marry? In other words, which of the above reactions, 1, 2, or 3, would be more spontaneous and thus more energetically favored? The puzzle, however, remained a mystery during these years. The key issue was to understand how instantaneous values of “enthalpy” H and “entropy” S change, per component species, second-by-second, over the period of 18-years, from the second the two potentials (A and B) meet to the time the product (the child) is 15-years old and begins to detach from the parental structure.


On November 15, 2001, at 3:00 AM, however, the mystery began to be solved, to a certain extent. In this timeframe, Thims had been up memorizing anatomy for several hours and decided to take a short mental break and read some of British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s Illustrated A Brief History of Time, wherein he eluded to the idea that when one educates themselves, over a period of 10-20 years, such as in the pursuit of an occupation, that their neurological entropy changes as a result. With this clue, and with previous ideas by Thims that changes in values of human enthalpy, in some way, correlates to physical heat and correlative changes in perceptual levels of beauty, Thims was able to put the puzzle together, thus connecting second-by-second changes in a person’s values of G, H, S, over evolutions of decades, with human mating.

In this mode of logic, in 2001 and 2002, Thims had neglected to include the product “AB” (the marriage union entity) in his calculations. In other words, a more complete version of the reproduction reaction is:

A + B → AB + C

where the union “AB” is a new type of chemical entity, that had never before been addressed by the hard science community. This opened up a whole new puzzle. In other words, Thims had no conception of the "AB attachment" or bond (this detail was ignored in early 1995-2001 calculations) from a physics or chemical point of view, such as would be the described by the attachment of two hydrogen atoms in the from a hydrogen molecule HH or H2.

Subsequently, in late 2002 or early 2003, it soon became apparent to Thims that he was leaving out an important component of the reaction, i.e. the AB bond of the attached couple or married pair. The investigation then began to understand what this “AB bond” means from a chemical point of view or fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear) point of view. For at least a half a year or more, the issue remained a puzzle.

Soon, however, a number of views on the nature of the human chemical bond began to emerge. On 11/10/03, Thims synthesized the concept of Human Molecular Orbital Theory as based on Hybridized Molecular Orbital Theory of small molecules according to the Schrödinger equation. On 05/10/04, Thims formulated the Field Particle Exchange Theory of inter-human molecular bonding as based on QED, QCD, particle physics, evolutionary psychology, and the fundamental particles, which define human molecules to be bonded electromagnetically via connections of either direct or indirect photon bonds. These theoretical points of view, among others, were combined with data from American psychologist John Gottman, who found, by studying 2,000 newly married couples, that stable marriage couples had 5-to-1 ratio of positive-to-negative exchanges in their microsecond interactions, to synthesize the basic outline of the human chemical bond.

In November of 2005, in order for contributors of the newly forming Journal of Human Thermodynamics to have a decent “human bond” article to reference for future writings, Thims attempted to write “On the Nature of the Human Chemical Bond”, the world’s first-ever unified article of this sort. [1] Thims, however, became frozen after writing the first 18-pages. He arrived at the view that such an article, which would easily go past the 30-page limit, would be too large to fit on a webpage. Subsequently, this fact along with dozens of internet arguments with other chemists and physicist that the idea of “human chemistry” is some kind of joke and, significantly, a comment, directed towards Thims, on November 24, 2005, by an American high school geology teacher, that the idea of human chemical reactions occurring between human molecules is “good for a laugh, but not much else”, launched the writing of the science of human chemistry.

Then, sometime in early 2006, during a reading of Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine’s 1994 book Order out of Chaos, Thims came across an endnote reference (in the back of the book, pg. 319):

Dobbs, op. cit., also examined the role of the ‘mediator’ by which two substances are made ‘sociable’. We may recall here the importance of the mediator in Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Engl. Trans. Greenwood 1976). For what concerns chemistry, Goethe was not far from Newton.

At this point, strangely enough, even though Thims is 50% German, and had at that time over 750 science books in his home library collection, he had never heard of Goethe. In any event, after finally reading Elective Affinities it has since become his all-time favorite book and it was what gave Thims the confidence to write the world’s first ever textbook on the subject of human chemistry (basically the modern view of what Goethe was theorizing about 200 years ago).

On November 7, 2006, Thims sent an email to an internet associate of his, a theoretical physicist named Par, stating that he was in the process of writing an approximate 150-page book on the topic of human chemistry, “situated on the premise that each human being is a molecule and that human molecules react, form bonds, de-bond, abide by the laws of thermodynamics energetically, etc., just as do all assemblies of molecules.” [2] In this email, Thims stated that:

“I’m forced to write a book out of necessity; I’ve found that I can’t talk to anyone intelligently about any kind of thermodynamic theory of human life until someone situates a basic textbook arguing that human life is a chemical process involving human chemical reactions between human molecules and the bonds formed or broken therein, i.e. reactions between people, and the energetics associated with this. Most of the book is going to be based on Carnot, Clausius, Gibbs, Helmholtz, Goethe (the first person to write an actual human chemistry book [1809]), Gladyshev, and about a dozen others.”

The resultant two-volume bookset Human Chemistry was published in September of 2007 and took 18-months and 14-days to write.

References
1. Thims, Libb. (2005). “On the Nature of the Human Chemical Bond.” Journal of Human Thermodynamics, Vol. 1, Issue 5 (pg. 36-61) – November (left un-finished).
2. Email from Thims to Par dated Tuesday, November 7, 2006 8:03:36 PM.