crawling of snakes. As the reptating molecules thrash, then wriggle,
then finally merely twitch, the once- thin and viscous liquid becomes
a tough mass of fossilized, interpenetrating plastic molecular
spaghetti.
And it is strong. Even pure cyanoacrylate can lift a ton with a
single square-inch bond, and one advanced elastomer-modified '80s
mix, "Black Max" from Loctite Corporation, can go up to 3,100 pounds.
This is enough strength to rip the surface right off most substrates.
Unless it's made of chrome steel, the object you're gluing will likely
give up the ghost well before a properly anchored layer of Superglue
will.
Superglue quickly found industrial uses in automotive trim,
phonograph needle cartridges, video cassettes, transformer
laminations, circuit boards, and sporting goods. But early superglues
had definite drawbacks. The stuff dispersed so easily that it
sometimes precipitated as vapor, forming a white film on surfaces
where it wasn't needed; this is known as "blooming." Though
extremely strong under tension, superglue was not very good at
sudden lateral shocks or "shear forces," which could cause the glue-
bond to snap. Moisture weakened it, especially on metal-to-metal
bonds, and prolonged exposure to heat would cook all the strength
out of it.
The stuff also coagulated inside the tube with annoying speed,
turning into a useless and frustrating plastic lump that no amount of
squeezing of pinpoking could budge -- until the tube burst and and
the thin slippery gush cemented one's fingers, hair, and desk in a
mummified membrane that only acetone could cut.
Today, however, through a quiet process of incremental
improvement, superglue has become more potent and more useful
than ever. Modern superglues are packaged with stabilizers and
thickeners and catalysts and gels, improving heat capacity, reducing
brittleness, improving resistance to damp and acids and alkalis.
Today the wicked stuff is basically getting into everything.
Including people. In Europe, superglue is routinely used in
surgery, actually gluing human flesh and viscera to replace sutures
and hemostats. And Superglue is quite an old hand at attaching fake
fingernails -- a practice that has sometimes had grisly consequences
when the tiny clear superglue bottle is mistaken for a bottle of
eyedrops. (I haven't the heart to detail the consequences of this
mishap, but if you're not squeamish you might try consulting The
Journal of the American Medical Association, May 2, 1990 v263 n17
p2301).
Superglue is potent and almost magical stuff, the champion of
popular glues and, in its own quiet way, something of an historical
advent. There is something pleasantly marvelous, almost Arabian
Nights-like, about a drop of liquid that can lift a ton; and yet one can
buy the stuff anywhere today, and it's cheap. There are many urban
legends about terrible things done with superglue; car-doors locked
forever, parking meters welded into useless lumps, and various tales
of sexual vengeance that are little better than elaborate dirty jokes.
There are also persistent rumors of real-life superglue muggings, in
which victims are attached spreadeagled to cars or plate-glass
windows, while their glue-wielding assailants rifle their pockets at
leisure and then stroll off, leaving the victim helplessly immobilized.
While superglue crime is hard to document, there is no
question about its real-life use for law enforcement. The detection
of fingerprints has been revolutionized with special kits of fuming
ethyl-gel cyanoacrylate. The fumes from a ripped-open foil packet of
chemically smoking superglue will settle and cure on the skin oils
left in human fingerprints, turning the smear into a visible solid
object. Thanks to superglue, the lightest touch on a weapon can
become a lump of plastic guilt, cementing the perpetrator to his
crime in a permanent bond.
And surely it would be simple justice if the world's first
convicted superglue mugger were apprehended in just this way.
"Creation Science"
In the beginning, all geologists and biologists were creationists.
This was only natural. In the early days of the Western scientific
tradition, the Bible was by far the most impressive and potent source
of historical and scientific knowledge.
The very first Book of the Bible, Genesis, directly treated
matters of deep geological import. Genesis presented a detailed
account of God's creation of the natural world, including the sea, the
sky, land, plants, animals and mankind, from utter nothingness.
Genesis also supplied a detailed account of a second event of
enormous import to geologists: a universal Deluge.
Theology was queen of sciences, and geology was one humble
aspect of "natural theology." The investigation of rocks and the
structure of the landscape was a pious act, meant to reveal the full
glory and intricacy of God's design. Many of the foremost geologists
of the 18th and 19th century were theologians: William Buckland,
John Pye Smith, John Fleming, Adam Sedgewick. Charles Darwin
himself was a one-time divinity student.
Eventually the study of rocks and fossils, meant to complement
the Biblical record, began to contradict it. There were published
rumblings of discontent with the Genesis account as early as the
1730s, but real trouble began with the formidable and direct
challenges of Lyell's uniformitarian theory of geology and his disciple
Darwin's evolution theory in biology. The painstaking evidence
heaped in Lyell's *Principles of Geology* and Darwin's *Origin of
Species* caused enormous controversy, but eventually carried the
day in the scientific community.
But convincing the scientific community was far from the end
of the matter. For "creation science," this was only the beginning.
Most Americans today are "creationists" in the strict sense of
that term. Polls indicate that over 90 percent of Americans believe
that the universe exists because God created it. A Gallup poll in
1991 established that a full 47 percent of the American populace
further believes that God directly created humankind, in the present
human form, less than ten thousand years ago.
So "creationism" is not the view of an extremist minority in our
society -- quite the contrary. The real minority are the fewer than
five percent of Americans who are strictly non-creationist. Rejecting
divine intervention entirely leaves one with few solid or comforting
answers, which perhaps accounts for this view's unpopularity.
Science offers no explanation whatever as to why the universe exists.
It would appear that something went bang in a major fashion about
fifteen billion years ago, but the scientific evidence for that -- the
three-degree background radiation, the Hubble constant and so forth
-- does not at all suggest *why* such an event should have happened
in the first place.
One doesn't necessarily have to invoke divine will to explain
the origin of the universe. One might speculate, for instance, that
the reason there is Something instead of Nothing is because "Nothing
is inherently unstable" and Nothingness simply exploded. There's
little scientific evidence to support such a speculation, however, and
few people in our society are that radically anti-theistic. The