GUIDO BOGNOLO
Scientific advisory board of H&PC Today – Household and Personal Care Today (TKS Publisher)

The Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico developed at the beginning of the 18th century the intriguing concept that history repeats itself. There is nothing new under the sun, he argues: in the context of an appropriate time frame what we experience today is just a disguised repetition of something that has already happened at one time or another. Maybe the events manifest themselves with different superficial appearances, but scratching below the surface, taking into due accounts evolutional phenomena (e.g. the deepening of scientific knowledge, the emergence of new technologies, the expansion of the boundaries of the observable, the socio-economic evolution just to quote some of the major) and getting to the core of facts the similarities are amazing. And predicting the future is no longer a matter of wizardy but just an intelligent interpretation of the past.

You may agree or disagree with this view, but you cannot deny that it has some merits.

I anticipate your question now: what has all this to do with surfactants? Well, surfactants repeat themselves.

True the time horizon which we can consider is ...