Biochemical engineer Jacob Israelachvili can occasionally be coaxed into giving after-dinner talks about his favorite hobby, the history and philosophy of science, based on his fountain of knowledge on this subject. Since his school days, he has enjoyed reading historical accounts and biographies about history's greatest scientific minds, including renaissance men like Galileo, scoundrels like Benjamin Thomson (aka Count Rumford) who mixed science with political intrigue, and quiet and underappreciated thinkers like Josiah Gibbs, the first American to receive a Ph.D. in engineering and one of Israelachvili's favorites. All these scientists have provided him with a sense of amazement and inspiration, not to mention many entertaining tales.
Someday, roles may change, and Israelachvili may himself be the topic of a future science history aficionado. After a distinguished research career in Europe and Australia, Israelachvili has been a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA) for the past 20 years, studying the various interactions between molecules and surfaces, principally in a liquid environment. His work in determining the theoretical basis and dynamics of forces that contribute to friction, fluidity, adhesion, and repulsion has wide-ranging applications in areas including medicine, geology, and food science. Israelachvili has designed or improved several instruments that enable direct force measurements as well as authored the definitive textbook on this field, Intermolecular and Surface Forces, in 1985 (1). In 2004, he was elected to both the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences for his research contributions.
Of all of the particles and surfaces Israelachvili has examined, however, one of the most mundane, water, has remained the most mysterious. “It's so small and simple and common, and yet it's very complicated,” he says. Especially complicated is water's hydrophobic effect. “When water gets next to a surface that …
