Chapter 6, Problem 17CQ

BIO The foot of your average gecko is covered with billions of tiny hair tips—called spatulae—that are made of keratin, the protein found in human hair. A subtle shift of the electron distribution in both the spatulae and the wall to which a gecko clings produces an adhesive force by means of the van der Waals interaction between molecules. Suppose a gecko uses its spatulae to cling to a vertical windowpane. If you were to describe this situation in terms of a coefficient of static friction, μ_s, what value would you assign to μ_s? Is this a sensible way to model the gecko’s feat? Explain.