To be truthful, my mother used to lock my bedroom door to keep me inside at night. She was ( justifiably) correct that I might take apart the TV and get killed by a capacitor discharge. Looking back on myself and what I had done, I can see why. I was born in 62 and was dangerous to myself ( and others ) by 1967. Thankfully i never got that far out of control.
Rita is now 71 (at the time of this comment). She went on to be an actress and worked as a double for Patty Duke on the Patty Duke Show and later as Carol Deming on the soap opera, As the World Turns, among other acting roles. She eventually became an optician. So she did end up in a science related profession.
The bit with the clean sheets of glass reminds me of one of the early lectures in Richard Feynman's recorded series on physics. Talking about efforts to figure out how to populate tables of the amount of friction between flat surfaces of various substances, he pointed out what happens if you get two blocks of copper extremely clean and smooth: it's hard to get them to slide across each other, because the molecules at the touching surfaces of the blocks 'aren't sure' which block they're part of.
For magnets, Mr. Wizard sort of explained why a true perpetual motion device, that uses repelling magnets, won't work. Magnets will equalize repelling and attracting at an in-between state, where the repelling and attracting becomes stable in a stationary state (at rest).
Precision gage blocks will stick together without the need for adhesive. This is because their surfaces are extremely smooth and even. This is the first time I've seen someone explain the attraction of the positive and negative charges in molecules. One thing Mr. Wizard didn't mention is that an additional force holding surfaces together is air pressure. Once you have forced out all air between the surfaces, air pressure from the outside is pushing the two things together.
They will not stick together just one on top of the other - air pressure and smooth surface will not make them stick in the situation shown on this show.
