Now I get to do something with that force scale I built. I had a request some time ago to talk about friction. Friction is surprisingly complicated. When two surfaces rub against each other, why is ...

I learned to respect friction, as a phenomenon with many nuances, when I was a graduate student. One day, while teaching a problem session in elementary mechanics, I unwisely invented a new problem to ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

Technological limitations have made studying friction on the atomic scale difficult, but researchers have now made advances in that quest on two fronts. By speeding up a real atomic force microscope ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 15, 2015 -- Friction, the force that slows down objects as they slide across a surface, can save lives when car brakes are slammed. Yet despite its obvious importance, no one ...

Physicists should “think big” when it comes to calculating the effects of friction on tiny nanomachines, according to researchers in the US, who say that they have strong evidence against the widely ...