Sometimes you think you have a complete understanding of something and then BOOM—a simple problem throws everything out the window. Let's consider a very basic physics problem involving pushing a ...

Is friction real? Once, with the quiet certainty of someone who just stayed up all night in the company of equations describing concrete, my college roommate told me that friction was made up. Now, ...

Quick, out behind the bike shed, Professors Pendry and Leonhardt are having a fight over a completely hypothetical situation. If we hurry, we should catch the end of round three. Science: it is ...

“Dragging” ultracold ions across an optical lattice has provided important insights into friction. By tweaking the distance between the ions, Alexei Bylinskii, Dorian Gangloff and Vladan Vuletić of ...

Really, this is the experiment I wanted to start on. How does friction work in Bad Piggies? Let me start with a quick summary of my experiments so far. Scale. For the size of stuff in Bad Piggies, I ...

Friction at the atomic scale appears to depend on the speed at which two surfaces move past each other. This surprising behaviour was observed as the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) moves ...

A model system has been presented by researchers that allows the investigation of atomic-scale friction effects and friction dynamics that are similar to those taking place, for instance, in proteins, ...

MIT scientists have coaxed atoms into an exotic “edge state” for the first time, allowing them to flow completely friction-free. The breakthrough could lead to better superconductor materials. As ...

Heh, maybe the problem is the premise. What real surface made of matter would even come close to this? Strikes me too as a case of theoreticians being wankers. Maybe I'm unimaginative, but I can't see ...