Course introduction:
Romantic Chemistry, similar to Physical Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry and other disciplines, is a secondary discipline of chemistry. Also known as chemical love theory, its main research objects are love and other intimate relationships, and the research method used is comparison & contrast.
This course requires students to have a foundation in structural chemistry. (The lecturer has something to say: This requirement is not high, as long as students who have studied the structure and properties of matter in middle school can meet the standard)
Guided reading trial lesson plan:
L'Ami de mon amie (1987) This film is the sixth in Rohmer's Comedy and Proverbs series, inspired by the proverb "My friend's friend is also my friend". "Girlfriend's Boyfriend" is the sixth installment in Rohmer's "Comedy and Proverbs" series, inspired by the saying "my friend's friend is also my friend".
The structure of this sentence is not unfamiliar. Students should have heard a similar sentence: the enemy of a friend is an enemy, and the enemy of an enemy is a friend. No permanent friends, only permanent interests. The theory of International Relations (IR) applied to interpersonal relationships is apparently literal flak for mosquitoes. Without going into details, let's go back to that proverb.
It is very different from the sentence we came across when we studied the characteristics of feudal society in Western Europe: the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.
I believe that most people think when they see the title "Girlfriend's Boyfriend", and they only dare to be: My girlfriend's boyfriend is not my boyfriend.
After removing the constraints of rigid ethics and moral standards, I will revisit the plot of the movie: "My girlfriend's boyfriend" becomes "my boyfriend". This process is hard not to remind those of us who have a common sense of chemistry to think that we learned the earliest One of several basic redox reactions of : elemental iron displaces copper from copper sulfate solution.
In more detail it is:
1. By chance, Bleisha (elemental iron) and Leah (divalent copper ions) became friends
2. Leah has a boyfriend Fabin (sulfate ion), and Bleisha replaces Leah (Bleisha and Fabin are in love with each other)
3. Bleisha is very individual (the copper element is not very active, and it is difficult to react), only Alexander who has the same individuality (concentrated nitric acid with strong oxidizing property) can arouse her interest (concentrated nitric acid can react with elemental copper)
4. Alexander is handsome and charming (strong oxidative), and is a well-known handsome guy in the local community. Blaisha (Iron) was also fascinated by him at first, but he stammered nervously when they met repeatedly (iron and concentrated nitric acid have a passivation reaction, Dense oxides form on the metal surface, preventing subsequent reactions from occurring).
Even the color of the dress can vaguely match the characteristics of chemical substances: at the end of the film, the dialogue that makes people laugh and laugh, when the two heroines have confirmed their relationship, Leah wears a blue dress (copper ions are blue ), Blaisha is wearing a green dress (ferrous ions are green); the two male protagonists don’t match the solution color scheme, probably because men are not the main event. I don't know if it's because of Rohmer's good chemical skills, or if he wants to create the feeling of a Midsummer Night's Dream by killing two birds with one stone.
That's it for the movie about Rohmer, and then we formally study our subject, "Roman Chemistry". The specialty of this discipline is that human relationships are likened to chemical bonds. If you are familiar with the connection between particles and particles, you will not be at a loss for the connection between people.
Here we need to remind everyone: the use of metaphorical rhetoric increases the risk of uncertainty in connotation. Since this discipline is based on the metaphor of interpersonal relationship as the ontology and chemical bond as the figurative body, every word, every theory, and every general reasoning and argument requires specifying the similarity between the ontology and the figurative body. Only by piercing the window paper can we avoid seeing flowers in the fog.
In the following lectures, I also invite students to pay attention to how I can improve the certainty of meaning.
"Social atomization" is a scholar's way of summarizing the phenomenon of the weakening of social connectivity today. We will not discuss how to improve this phenomenon today. We think along this line of thought and imagine ourselves as atoms. But we are not necessarily born naked and carefree. We may be born in a family, and then the family will form molecules, or elemental metals, or other substances. Nor is this innate connection insurmountable.
What Saint-Exupéry calls "domestication", and some people call it the establishment of emotional bonds, we call it the formation of chemical bonds in the context of the discipline.
There are three types of chemical bonds: ionic bonds, covalent bonds, and metallic bonds. Let's start with ionic bonds. This is a kind of relationship that makes people look a little scary, because it is a transfer of electrons - it seems to indicate that once a person enters a love life, something is bound to be lost. So the practice of sharing electron pairs like covalent bonds and metallic bonds, in my opinion, is better. Of course, individuals can have personal ideas.
Particles have almost no relative potential energy at long distances, but at extremely close distances, they have a strong mutual repulsion effect. Only when they are kept at a certain distance can they be in a stable state. Consistent with the last three sentences of Gibran's On Marriage. (And stand together, yet not too near together. For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress do not grow in each other's shadow. The colonnades stand apart, and oaks and cypresses can’t grow in each other’s shade.) The idea of distance in intimacy is so simple that my chemical analogy is a bit exaggerated. Indeed, the reasoning is still second, and this knowledge point is mainly to introduce the concept of "energy".
Our chemistry is a changing discipline, so why are these changes happening? Students who study thermodynamics know the Gibbs free energy. Generally speaking, we can judge whether a reaction or a change can proceed spontaneously by the Gibbs free energy being not less than 0 (van't Hoff formula and other physical and chemical knowledge) It is not the focus of this course and will not be expanded here).
The Gibbs free energy depends on the enthalpy change (whether the reaction is exothermic or not), the entropy change (whether the disorder increases) and temperature. Enthalpy change and entropy change depend on the properties of matter - just like the relationship between two people, it mainly depends on whether the two people have similar smells, and certain factors in the objective environment will also promote the two people to develop feelings, such as creating a crisis moment. , Using the suspension bridge effect, it is like the effect of heating. Some scholars will think that the use of the suspension bridge effect cannot be compared to raising the temperature (lowering the Gibbs free energy), but should be compared to the use of a catalyst, that is, small psychological tricks can only speed up the reaction rate and speed up the relationship between the two. , if the two are not reconciled at all, then no matter how the catalyst is used, there will be no reaction.
I don't think it's important to debate whether or not to use the objective environment to develop feelings here, because the chemical balance is dynamic. For example, in Rohmer's film, before the intervention of the external factor of Bleisha, the relationship between Leah and Fabin is so-so and manageable, just like the copper sulfate solution is a relatively stable environment. But no matter how stable the environment, as long as someone more in tune (the more active metal) appears, the reaction will still react. It is Gibbs' free energy to decide whether to replace or not to replace, not to be restrained by human ethics.
Unless, according to the original meaning of "societal atomization", we completely isolate ourselves from the world in order to avoid the intervention of outsiders. Of course, I think it would be boring if you really want to do this, but some people think that boating on Lihu Lake is a good choice, and I also hope that you will find someone who is willing to retire with you.
For the rest of the people, there will be a colorful world with more reactions, more attempts and more exploration. I wish you all chrome, the more you react, the more colorful the color.
Okay, so that's all for today, I'll leave a homework assignment:
In analysing the film, I compared two women to metal and one man to acid, but this difference does not mean to reinforce the gender difference. Can you analyze their emotional changes from the perspective of Fabien and Alexander, using chemical knowledge?
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