A closer look

Teflon is so incredibly slippery and unreactive that the only way engineers can actually get it to stick to your frying pan is by aggressively sandblasting the metal and using toxic primer chemicals to forcefully lock it into microscopic craters; the fact that we engineered the most non-stick substance in the known universe and then immediately dedicated millions of dollars to the paradoxical problem of figuring out how to make it stick to something perfectly encapsulates the human scientific endeavor, creating a miracle and then violently breaking its rules just to cook a slightly easier omelet