There wasn't a vacant seat in the Rackham Amphitheater yesterday as people sat tight in the aisles to hear Nobel Laureate for physics, Prof. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, talk about the way things stick together.
De Gennes was this year's speaker for the Ta-You Wu lecture - an annual event put on by the department of physics in honor of Wu, who graduated from the University in 1933 and went on to reform science education in China and Taiwan.
De Gennes directs a national research institute in Paris.
His lecture, titled "Principles of Adhesion," was an informal discussion - the general public was welcomed - about the forces that bind objects together, those that pull them apart, and how the two interact.
The 1991 Nobel Prize winner began his talk by tracing the beginnings of adhesives to the ancient Phoenicians, who used turpentine, tar and wax to form glue.
He then jumped to the turn of this century when polymers began to be used more frequently - some of them as glue to assemble the pieces of early wooden airplanes.
De Gennes made the lecture accessible to non-scientists by presenting only a few simple engineering formulas on the overhead and using examples from the everyday world - such as Scotch tape, polystyrene, race car tires and clasping one's hands together - to illustrate abstruse scientific principles.
"I thought he was very insightful," said Muppirala Ravirumar, a research scientist in the University's biophysics department.
"He put complex phenomena into simple words - the reality is much more complex than that," Ravirumar said.
Claire Lacas, graduate student of electrical engineering and computer science, also said De Gennes did a good job of articulating his subject.
"In France he's famous for making such difficult things easy to understand," Lacas said. "Everyone with scientific backgrounds and people in general tend to understand what he is saying."
But it wasn't only the scientific aspects of the lecture that were accessible as de Gennes' sense of humor showed in comments like, "Nature, like us, is lazy and chooses the easiest path," to describe the dissipation of stresses.
"It's the reaction of a theorist - not understanding a problem, I move to another," to describe his reaction to a paradoxical phenomenon.
De Gennes also told a story about a young man who sought De Gennes' counsel on how to best cast a mold of his girlfriend so that he could make an accurate sculpture of her.
De Gennes was born in Paris in 1932, graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1955 and has been the director of the Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie, in Paris, for the past 20 years.