Читать книгу Sticking Together - Steven Abbott - Страница 25

One more thing. Like most people, I had gone through much of my life tending to focus on the adhesive. During a very heated debate (scientists can get quite passionate) with some top scientists at a large chemical company I felt the frustration of positions hardening and drifting ever further apart, until one of their scientists, Dr Michele Seitz, said, “But adhesion is a property of the system”. That one sentence entirely changed the debate and it turned out that both sides had been focussing too much on specifics and not on the system. It also entirely changed my approach to adhesion, and I remain grateful to Dr Seitz for her momentous intervention.

Now we have all the basics in place, it is time to start exploring adhesion. And a good place to start is without any adhesives at all. In other words, it is time to learn about geckos.