Book description
A cutting-edge science book in the style of 'Fermat's Last Theorem' and
'Chaos' from an exciting and accessible voice in popular science writing.
Bio-inspiration is a form of engineering but not in the conventional
sense. Extending beyond our established and preconceived notions,
scientists, architects and engineers are looking at imitating nature by
manufacturing 'wet' materials such as spider silk or the surface of the
gecko's foot.
The amazing power of the gecko's foot has long been known - it can
climb a vertical glass wall and even walk upside down on the ceiling -
but no ideas could be harnessed from it because its mechanism could not
be seen with the power of optical microscopes. Recently however the
secret was solved by a team of scientists in Oregon who established that
the mechanism really is dry, and that it does not involve suction,
capillary action or anything else the lay person might imagine. Each
foot has half a million bristles and each bristle ramifies into hundreds
of finer spatula-shaped projections. The fine scale of the gecko's foot
is beyond the capacity of conventional microengineering, but a team of
nanotechnologists have already made a good initial approximation.
The gecko's foot is just one of many examples of this new 'smart'
science. We also discover, amongst other things, how George de Mestral's
brush with the spiny fruits of the cocklebur inspired him to invent
Velcro; how the shape of leaves opening from a bud has inspired the
design of solar-powered satellites; and the parallels between cantilever
bridges and the spines of large mammals such as the bison.
The new 'smart' science of Bio-inspiration is going to produce a
plethora of products over the next decades that will transform our
lives, and force us to look at the world in a completely new way. It is
science we will be reading about in our papers very soon; it is the
science of tomorrow's world. '[Forbes has] An easy style and an
innocence of jargon, and he treads softly on his scientists' dreams.
Forbes prefers the term “bio-inspiration” to “biomimetics”. The aim is
not slavishly to imitate nature, but to learn from it to develop our own
solutions to engineering problems. And he is surely right to pounce now,
before inspiration turns to perspiration. He has succeeded splendidly.'
Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Independent
'The book is a witty blend of anecdote and analysis.' Rita Carter,
Daily Mail
'[Forbes] provides an illuminating discussion of the evolution of
visual systems and the emergence of contemporary understandings of the
nature of light.' Dr Brendan Kelly, Sunday Business Post Peter Forbes
has written a series of articles Biomimetics for the Guardian and a
chapter on the same subject for the Guardian's book, 'Frontiers 03'
(Atlantic Books). He was the editor of Poetry Review from 1986 to 2002
and his anthology 'Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the
Twentieth Century in Verse' was widely acclaimed. He translated Primo
Levi's personal anthology, 'The Search for Roots', (Penguin Press) in
2001 and Bloodaxe published his latest poetry anthology 'We have come
through' in 2003.
