It’s time to wake up. You pour water to make coffee, then take a shower, but you have difficulty grabbing the bar of soap, which adheres to its holder. After the shower, you comb your wet hair. In the kitchen, you observe condensed water drops inside your refrigerator, cook breakfast in a Teflon-coated pan, and look out a window blurred with water drops that condensed during the night. You walk outside and see dropsshimmering on the grass, flowers, and a spider web. At a touch, the drops roll rapidly off the flowers. At work you paint. The bristles of your paintbrush coalesce as you remove it from the paint. You decide to write about what you’ve observed, but the only paper you have does not retain the ink from your pen.
All these phenomena—some at home, some in nature, some in industry—involve wetting, the contact that liquids make with surfaces....
