Love might be a second-order phase transition | Hacker News Reader

Love might be a second-order phase transition

arxiv.org

61 pointsaaraujo00217 comments

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.

I thought it was a joke too, judging from the date of submission—almost exactly one week before April Fool's Day.

"Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Romance"

Note, the submission to Physics Letters A was completed March 30th, just one day before April Fools.

It is a joke, man.

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.

> 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." :-)

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)

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.

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...

It's the "intensity of feeling".

That’s euphoria

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?

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.

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.

Too bad it's not a first-order phase transition so it could have a latent heat of fusion!

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

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