The gecko “stickiness” is a complex phenomenon that borders on cosmic level spookiness. It amounts to an ability to create bonding forces at a molecular level that can be turned on and off by the gecko depending on whether it’s feet need to stick to or be pulled away from a given surface.
There are tens of thousands of the tiny setae. And each of the setae is branched out into thousands of spatulae. So the gecko’s foot has millions of the super-tiny spatulae that are the locus of the binding and unbinding electrical molecular attraction that gives the animal this, well, Spider-Man level superpower.
The key is something called “van der Waals forces” which is generally defined as “the relatively weak attractive forces that act on neutral atoms and molecules and that arise because of the electric polarization induced in each of the particles by the presence of other particles.”
We’re reaching a limit, here. A limit where physics edges towards quantum physics, where the merely phenomenal borders on the mystical, the physical on the metaphysical.
The gecko “stickiness” is a complex phenomenon that borders on cosmic level spookiness. It amounts to an ability to create bonding forces at a molecular level that can be turned on and off by the gecko depending on whether it’s feet need to stick to or be pulled away from a given surface.
There are tens of thousands of the tiny setae. And each of the setae is branched out into thousands of spatulae. So the gecko’s foot has millions of the super-tiny spatulae that are the locus of the binding and unbinding electrical molecular attraction that gives the animal this, well, Spider-Man level superpower.
The key is something called “van der Waals forces” which is generally defined as “the relatively weak attractive forces that act on neutral atoms and molecules and that arise because of the electric polarization induced in each of the particles by the presence of other particles.”
We’re reaching a limit, here. A limit where physics edges towards quantum physics, where the merely phenomenal borders on the mystical, the physical on the metaphysical.