Casimir forces: Still surprising after 60 years

It might come as a surprise that both the gecko's ability to walk across ceilings in apparent defiance of gravity and the evaporation of black holes through Hawking radiation can be understood as arising from zero-point fluctuations of quantum fields. The connections can be made thanks to work done at Philips Laboratories in the late 1940s by Hendrik Casimir and collaborators, work described in a series of three papers. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.