Probably everyone is familiar with the phenomenon: water drops cling to a pane of glass, if it is tilted out of the horizontal plane. Only when a certain angle is reached they slide off. This raises ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...