In hmolscience, Kenneth Connors (1932-) is an American pharmacologist, a pioneer of pharmaceutical thermodynamics, noted for 2002 footnote on the analogies between balancing components of energy and entropy in physical systems, quantified by free energy, and balancing components of security and liberty (freedom) in social systems, quantified by politics. “It is not too fanciful to draw an analogy with a political science setting, in which each society must choose its own compromise position between the extremes of maximum security (the energy component) and maximum liberty (the entropy component).”In 2010, Connors, together with co-author Italian-born American pharmaceutical chemist Sandro Mecozzi (Ѻ), in their second edition, restated the above footnote, albeit in a little more organized fashion, with the footnote bottom page, versus end of chapter (2002), showing a free energy diagram concordantly; the newer presentation, with the footnote inserted, reads as follows: [3]
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| Connor’s figure 3.1 captioned as “free energy of a reacting chemical system, showing how the direction of the reaction depends on the initial state of the system”, amid his free energy and political science discussions. [3] |
“The essential characteristic of the Gibbs free energy function is its combination of both energy and entropy components in a form that reveals how these two thermodynamic concepts complete to generate a compromise that determines the position of equilibrium in a chemical process. It is not too fanciful to draw an analogy with a political science setting, in which each society must choose its own compromise position between the extremes of maximum security (the energy component) and maximum liberty (the entropy component). A more negative ΔH favors spontaneous reaction, and a more positive ΔS favors spontaneous reaction, in both instances making ΔG more negative.”
