A Response to Leonard.
By making available an excerpt from Rossini’s address, Harold Leonard has given us a good example of anthropomorphism in chemistry. The concepts of “freedom” and “security” (like “order” and “randomness”) were parts of our cultural heritage long before modern thermodynamics was formulated. Entropy was defined solely in response to the need to explain certain modern experimental observations. It was never necessary to invoke concepts like “freedom” and “security” to systematize these same specialized experiments. At best, associating “freedom” with entropy is similar on other loose associations as when we say a shaft moving in an oversize bearing has too much “freedom”. While there is a “freedom” for which one might die to defend, it is certainly not the “freedom” of an oversize bearing nor that of entropy. Such anthropomorphic associations might help some students absorb abstract concepts. They certainly are not part of the conceptual framework of the science.
The danger of such anthropomorphisms is that we really come to believe that there is substance in them. In this particular case, there is the danger that true human freedom will be reduced to some sort of physical freedom on the same par with entropy. There is the danger that some will think that true human freedom can be measured in terms of some sort of calculus of simultaneous maximums and minimums. And worst of all, there is the danger that chemical thermodynamics will have ascribed to it a power that it simply does not have, namely, the power to “explain” the human condition. There may be a sense in which Chemistry is the “Central Science”. This is certainly not it.
It is possible that Rossini did not intend his associations to be taken as seriously as suggested here. Nonetheless, rather than encourage loose thinking through the use of such anthropomorphisms, it would be wise to purge them from science. Let Chemistry solve those problems for which it was created. Let true Wisdom solve the problems arising from the human condition.
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