[HN Gopher] Love might be a second-order phase transition
___________________________________________________________________
Love might be a second-order phase transition
Author : aaraujo002
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-08-24 09:35 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| isaacfrond wrote:
| The paper takes three books (Romeo and Juliet, Lilly of the
| Valley, and Martin Eden) and has readers score four points in
| them for feeling.
|
| Not just any readers mind you! But readers that are "used to
| reading texts instead of watching movies and YouTube"
|
| The resulting values are then fitted to some curve or other.
| Unsurprisingly, fitting four points works just fine.
|
| This apparently supports their key hypothesis "that love is a
| second-order phase transition occurring in the human brain under
| the influence of hormones, such as dopamine and serotonin". That
| the brain or hormones have something to do with love, I'm ready
| to believe, how it ties in with non-youtubing readers of Romeo
| and Julliet, not so much.
| jmeister wrote:
| A paper on love by French physicists that doesn't reference
| Stendhal? He got there first, mon freres:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallization_(love)
| [deleted]
| sdwr wrote:
| Thanks. I like how an anecdote like that has its own wiki page.
| I don't exactly know what a "second-order phase transition" is,
| but it's clear to me that there's some kind of internal economy
| that reorients itself.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I have a habit of viewing human relationships and interactions
| through a lens of chemistry.
|
| Thinking of people as atoms (or molecules, depending on the
| analogy) is a deep mine of metaphors.
| [deleted]
| reidjs wrote:
| I thought this would be about an actual physics term, love
| numbers, but no, this is about metaphysics nonsense.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_number
| jawns wrote:
| The source paper could be arguing two things:
|
| What we experience as love is a physical process in the brain
| that includes a second-order phase transition.
|
| Second-order phase transitions are appropriate to represent love
| on a metaphorical level, because our expressions of love have
| several things in common with them.
|
| Can anyone confirm which it is?
| martopix wrote:
| The single worst thing about this paper is that they claim they
| are investigating the first, and their proof is entirely based
| on the second of your points.
| [deleted]
| sl-dolt wrote:
| > We see new faces all the time, but when the person becomes
| "ready" and crosses the transition point, the particular new face
| seen at this particular moment becomes the object of spontaneous
| symmetry breaking, which means that this effect is essentially
| random. The person could have seen somebody else (not completely
| disgusting) at this moment and would fallen in love in that other
| person.
|
| The first time I ever want to call a physics paper "adorable."
| :-)
| thisiscorrect wrote:
| Too bad it's not a first-order phase transition so it could have
| a latent heat of fusion!
| dakial1 wrote:
| I don't have access to the paper but I wonder how they define
| "Love". Is it sexual attractiveness? Is it the sensation of deep
| care for the other person? I believe those are different
| processes (thank god!) in our brain...
| isaacfrond wrote:
| It's the "intensity of feeling".
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's euphoria
| martopix wrote:
| I hope this is a joke. Physicists coming in and claiming things
| are critical here and there is a common thing in neuroscience,
| and it's in fact a rather serious and interesting field, but this
| has not prevented it from attracting some kind of jokes on the
| approach physicists have to neuroscience.
|
| This paper however is way beyond that, it has lots of problems:
|
| It claims it wants to investigate phase transition in the
| neuroscience of the brain, but only does so through the mediation
| of the phenomenology of love. And the latter is also only
| examined indirectly through literature. And literature is
| mediated through the lens of a few readers.
|
| Then, this is based on what, 2-3 books? And on a few readers? The
| chances of cherry-picking are huge. Plus, the experimenters
| themselves chose the sentences to be examined, which introduces a
| massive bias. They claim the "time" between one and the next is
| constant.
|
| In conclusion, I hope this is not meant seriously, but the fact
| that they acknowledge grants gives me little hope.
| sidpatil wrote:
| I thought it was a joke too, judging from the date of
| submission--almost exactly one week before April Fool's Day.
| djkorchi wrote:
| Note, the submission to Physics Letters A was completed March
| 30th, just one day before April Fools.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| "Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Romance"
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-24 23:02 UTC)