The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
— Carl Jung
Albert & Alberta discuss
It is essentially an exothermic reaction, isn't it? You collide, exchange a bit of energy, and your internal states are permanently shifted. It makes one rather cautious about who one decides to collide with.
Cautious? That sounds like a laboratory safety protocol. I see it more like architecture; we are constantly being renovated by the people we let through our front doors. Some leave cracks, others build skylights.
I suppose. Though from a physics standpoint, 'renovation' is just a polite way of describing entropy increasing within a closed system. You can't come out of an interaction exactly the same particles you went in as.
Maybe not, but that transformation is the whole point of the design, Albert. If we stayed as stagnant, unreacted substances, we would be incredibly boring to observe. We need the collisions to know what we are truly made of.