Essays. FSF Columns

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 a

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 begi

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 begi

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