Friction Matters: Resistance Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media podcast network.

This is on with Tara Swisher, and I'm Tara Swisher. My guest today is Tripologist Jennifer Veil. Tripology is the study of friction, where and lubrication between the interacting

“services in relative motion. It's a little known, but hugely important discipline.”

Jennifer is also the author of a new book entitled Friction, a biography. It's a fascinating look at the history of how humans have learned to understand and manipulate friction. We don't often think about the effects of friction, but once you become aware of them, you realize they're everywhere and impossible to unsee. I'm excited to talk to you about it because in technology, one of the things technologists try to do is eliminate all friction

including in social interactions. It's had an enormously bad effect on our society. Chatbots, the way we talk to each other, the way we conduct friction online, has become something that's been very deleterious to our species, I think, and so it's really important to understand the good and bad parts of friction. Of course, I'm a friction-filled person,

“and I have done very well by it, and I think it's really important to do that for creativity,”

for innovation, and for basic humanity. Our expert questions come from astrophysicist, Adam Becker, and Health Policy expert, Hezekiel Emanuel. This conversation will leave you feeling much smarter. It's a kind I really want to do here on on with Terrace, which I know I talk to a lot of big

names and stuff like that, but it's these issues that are critical and Jennifer has a lot to say on it,

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Do you have one of my store-ups? You don't have one. No, I don't have one. I have one. I just have one. I just have one. And when they work, the price is cheap. Jennifer, thanks for coming on on. Thank you for having me.

“I really appreciate this is a topic that matters a lot to me and I think it's important.”

It's about the word friction and it's a critically important thing in every aspect of life. So what do you start with the bigger picture of friction and why you decide it to write? What is a memoir actually about a scientific thing and also a emotional thing? Yes, so I can't say that friction was something as a kid. I thought I would end up having a career in. I didn't know it was possible to be a tribologist until Rip before I started a PhD.

But as I started the work on my PhD, I realized all of us are tribologists. We're dealing with friction all the time. It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. And there's not that many areas of size that actually touch on everything. You know, friction is at the cellular level. It's at space. So there's a lot of stories to tell with friction and the view of our evolution as a civilization can actually be seen through the lens of friction and how we have evolved to understand it and

how that's led to progress. So the memoir came about sort of naturally with friction telling it story to me and me realizing it was interesting enough to other people that we should put this on paper and talk about it. So a tribology experiment or tribology, we're going to pronounce it explain what that is for people. It is the study of friction. Yes, it's the science of interacting surfaces and relative motion. So we're looking at friction where and lubrication specifically.

And, you know, if it's a word you haven't heard before, you can join the club. It's a fun buzzword of the day. It isn't that old as a field of formalized science. It's actually almost exactly 60 years from today. March 9th, 1966 is when that term was coined. By whom? It was the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary proposed it. And Peter Jost was heading up this committee

thought it was simply due to bad lubrication. But when they looked into it, they realized there

“was actually lubricant present. So there was a bigger problem happening. And as they dug into it,”

they realized part of it was the design of the equipment, part of it was the material selection, part of it was the wrong lubricant being used. Some of it was the practice round lubrication. And they were like, oh no, this is an engineering problem. This is a chemistry problem. This is a physics problem. It's a mechanics problem. That's a whole field in itself. So it couldn't just call it lubrication, which is what they started the report as. And so Peter Jost reached out to the

editor of the Oxford English Dictionary asked for help. They came up with tribology. It's rooted in the Greek word. That means two rub. So we rub things together. And you've called yourself the ambassador for friction. And you say it gets a bad rap. I know we sort of talked about it, but what motivated you to challenge people to think about friction, even if they think about it all, because it's all around them walking through air is friction. Everything is friction, sex is friction,

relationships are friction, a car is friction. Talk about how what motivated you to think about it. You're about to be to think about it as I need to start changing perspectives on it.

“As a tribologist, I think any tribologists will tell you, whenever we hear the term frictionless,”

we get a little bit, that's not quite right, friction's there. And people would say this like frictionless was a better thing, was a good thing. And Silicon Valley does it. We'll get to that amendment. So it just plays into this almost naturally bad reputation friction has,

you know, the definition of friction has resistance in it in school. You're always told,

ignore friction to make it an ideal problem. And I just realized how much we have this bias against it. And don't realize how necessary it is that it's helping to keep the plates in the earth stabilize you and the friction slips. We have an earthquake that you're able to drive because of it. There's all these positives with friction. It's around us all the time. We don't necessarily appreciate it as a tribologist. You start to see it everywhere and appreciate it. And so I just figured,

if I see it everywhere, so should you. And you're giving a good rap. I agree with you. This is why I loved your book. So a lot of us learned about friction and high school physics. I only took a semester of that. We're showed an incline plane and then given formulas that either ignore friction, as you said, or treat a coefficient of friction as a fixed constant. My son who is a mechanical engineer talks about this all the time with me and I sit and stare at him.

And reality, there are multiple kinds of friction, of course. Talk about how friction behaves in the real world and why it's much more complicated in the simplified models we're taught in school. Yeah, there's one of the many misconceptions of friction. It's like a broken record with it. Is that it's a material property that it's just something inherent to the material. If I'm writing with a pencil, people will think that the friction is just used to the lead and the

pencil. It's actually the whole system that we're looking at. It's the friction between the pencil and the paper. So both of those things play in the friction. And so we've actually had to do a lot of debunking and reframing how people think about friction because for a very long time, they thought it was a constant that I also like this material and I'll go ahead and have an expected value of friction, which is not the case. It's more complicated than that.

In many ways, we can simplify friction, but you do have to take in the entire system. We can't just isolate the box. I need to know the box and the floor. And if you've ever had to push a heavy

box on the floor, like you know when you first start pushing, you sometimes almost face plant

because all of a sudden it gives and it's much easier. That's something called static friction. So when something sits for a while, it has the opportunity to get you more sticky with the contact, get more adhesive bonds, and so you actually have to use more force to break the floor. Yes, exactly with the system. And then you'll break those forces and you still have friction, but it's less. And so that would be, we would call that dynamic friction. So you have two types of

“friction there that you have to think about. So if you're trying to study friction in a system,”

you have to look at that startup. You know, a lot of my career as a neurologist has been focused specifically on that static friction. When I start up a car, how much onf do I need to overcome

the friction to get everything going? That sometimes is the most important part that maybe people

don't think about. And there's different mechanisms behind it. There's the friction involved with solid on solid, solid with fluid. You know, we all know the tricks add water, add grease to try to make things more slippery. The changes the friction of your system and how you might want to calculate it. And then, of course, moving through air and through water, like ships and planes, drag and totally different type of friction to consider. Right. So what are some of the

comments and beliefs that are wrong? Well, the main one is that friction's bad. Friction is just there,

we don't have a choice, but there are ways that we can either make more of it if we need it,

“or we can have less of it depending what we're trying to do. And they sometimes will think that it's”

100% just make things rougher, but sometimes rougher surface can actually help us reduce friction. So it's not a one-size-fits-all. I would say friction is one of these things where there is only some sort of exception even when we talk about our laws of friction. One of the ones that people will cite is that it's independent of the speed. You're moving something, but that one gets broken all the time. So you can't lump friction into one thing other than it's the force resisting motion

between bodies, but that's about all we can do. You can't make a stereotype around it beyond that.

Right. Right. We'll be back in a minute.

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been one of the hidden engines of civilization, and that understanding could lead to even more breakthroughs to control fire, for example, humans had to learn how to generate heat through friction, to make a will-use, so they had to balance high friction at the ground for traction with low friction at the axle, and ancient shipwilders were engineering boats to deal with, as you said, drag friction in water. Talk about your favorite moments in history or mastering friction was

“a breakthrough that enabled a transformative innovation. I think for me when I was going through”

this book, I was surprised at all the different examples throughout history of where we've been manipulating friction, whether we fully understood what we were doing or not. There was with the Roman chariots, you know, they were gracing their axles, but I think it was planning, who noted, there was a note in an ancient text that said, during chariot racing, there was a red glow, because the frictional heating could get that high. So, if you imagine as the person driving the chariot

standing above that axle, your feet would get really warm, and what they would do for this was they would actually, after certain distance or laps, splash water onto the chariot to cool down the frictional heating, which also keeps graces from igniting, and so I thought it was really fun

that this was essentially the first pit stop that I had in racing, and it was a necessity because

“of friction, because things just got very warm. Another interesting one, whether it was intentional”

or not, is that the Egyptians may have been using water to help optimize the friction in sand as they were moving sludges, so they found a painting that depicted, you know, an Egyptian carrying a vase of water in front of a sludge, moving a very heavy statue. And so, some was just to build the pyramids. In this case, the painting was moving a barge statue, but it would have been applicable for pyramids, too, because the last thing you want when you're moving those heavy stones is

extra resistance, and moving stuff in sand is not the easiest. So, researchers saw this and thought, well, they may have just been splashing water, because it was part of a ritual, but actually, could that have been helping the mechanics of this whole process, and they did find that splashes of water the way it changes how the sand is behaving would lower the friction and make it easier for a sludge to move over it, so that may have not been intentional, may not have been

why they started doing this, but they accidentally found a way to just make the friction more in their favor to move these really heavy objects around in the sand. You know, I was just at the Aaron Space Museum, and there's a whole thing about flying, of course, which is all about resistance and friction, correct? Correct, yes. And by the way, there was a right sister for people who don't

know, and the mother was also very, I'm sorry, I always mention it because I'm like, come on,

there was a sister at a mother. I appreciate that because even with all my research, they were never mentioned. Well, they are now at the Aaron Space Museum until, you know, some Trump administration official figures that out, but maybe they don't listen to this. Anyway, talk about ball bearings,

“it's an under-appreciated and incredibly important innovation. I mean, these are these little”

steel balls that are often used in all manner of mechanical things. Yeah, they're, they're there to give us rolling friction instead of sliding, rolling friction will always be lower, and it's amazing because if you were to look up on the internet, modern ball bearing, raceway, it looks exactly like a sketch that you will find in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. So they haven't really had to change much in their design. We had a grasp on these pretty early on. The craziest example to me

came from party boats that Emperor Collegula created in a lay-and-locked lake. There had been rumors of shipwrecks in this. It was Lake Nemi of a volcanic crater lake for, for years and years and years

of finally in 1890, divers got down there and found them and confirmed their shipwrecks down

here and they're big. So it was this whole, why are there these giant ships in this lay-and-lock thing? Well, it turns out Claudia, who's wildly on popular, just made giant floating party boats, and on those seem to have some sort of rotating platform or stage. Maybe the first sort of hitting club stage, I don't know, but on large bronze balls. So these were, you know, this bizarre show of friction engineering that the Romans did to help rotate these platforms. Those were ball bearings.

Right. And then Da Vinci sketched them out. The big innovation that came with ball bearings was when we were able to manufacture the stainless steel kind and get the very uniform and smith, but that's largely, you know, ball bearings have stayed the same over time because when you have a good solution, you have a good solution. Why wouldn't you go with it? So if you ask most people at friction means they probably picture two solids rubbing, right? Fluid friction is where things get complicated,

and what did that unlock? Yeah, I love where friction takes you since it's everywhere,

“and when the big breakthroughs was understanding friction of fluids came from the internal friction”

fluids field, which is viscosity. Isaac Newton suggested viscosity existed that there would be friction between the layers. And if there was high friction between the layers, it would resist flow, that would be high viscosity, something like honey. That's usually the example. Low friction

between those layers, you flow very easily, like water, and the nice breakthrough that came through

how to measure and understand the relationship between flow and viscosity came from simultaneous work being done by hydraulic engineer, Gati Hagen, looking at how to move river water through pipes, and then I'm going to put your same pussy, who was studying blood. So you have blood and you have pipes. Bath at the same time, they came to the same conclusion, and they determined how you could set up experiments with different pressure, different flow, and understand what viscosity was,

and that was just one step of the way, because there's also how fluid flows, it can be smooth, or it can be turbulent, and then there's this big question of, well if you have solids and contact,

“how does the fluid even get in between that contact? That's what we want to do, right, to lower”

friction, and so a gentleman named Osborne Reynolds is the one who figured out how to adapt lubrication

theory, and found the pressures in the system can cause the fluid to manage to sneak in there, I mean we all know if water is in city as it will go anywhere. And it actually, the fluid can have enough internal pressure to separate some of those solid contacts, and that lubrication theory really set us running and understanding how we can design machinery equipment to have lower friction. You were talking about blood flow, which is studied a lot. I happened to have what's called thick blood,

and it's one of the reasons for my stroke was because the thickness of the blood, the viscosity was high, is that correct that it was, or low? Yeah, so high, if you had thicker blood,

I would imagine it would be higher viscosity, so not flowing as easily, higher resistance

to flow, yes, exactly. And it can cause real problems in health, if that's the place, if people don't drink enough water, for example, that happens, you can get very sick, and it affects your blood, and you can be born that way, which is interesting. The industrial revolution would have happened, if scientists and engineers hadn't figured out a stop metal from destroying each other, because a lot of the industrial revolution is metal upon metal. We learned about the advances in

iron production steam engines, machine tools, and factories. There are unsung here as a industrial revolution was a lubrication that kept the shafts bearings and gears alive, long enough to run continuously, because if not they'd wear each other out. Yeah, so we get into lubrication, it gets complicated fast, so what a lubricant can do, you know, obviously the goal is to completely separate those solid contacts, two metals, for example, yes, our two metals. And if you look at the surface

of those metals, even if they seem smooth and you start zooming in, you notice that the surface

“of the metals are going to have hills and valleys. That's how surfaces are. And the contact will be”

at the high points between the surfaces, so we want the lubricant to get in between there, to separate them. If you put two little lubricant in there, you might just have dots of it around, but it's not really separating those high points on the contacts. So you're still dealing with the high friction of the metal and metal contact. And you can go from not separating any of those to starting to separate them, and the friction can start to drop dramatically, which in some

cases could be a problem as well, because you need to know, are you going to be in the high point, the low point, and that eventually you hit the minimum, where you have separated all of those out, and you get your low friction that presumably you want, because you want to separate your metal and metal. But if you start to put too much grease in there, you can actually start to get friction creeping back in, because of the viscosity of the lubricant that you're using.

So there's like a sweet spot. Anyone who's grinded a gear knows that, who drives this shift, I drive shift cars. I don't know if anyone does any more, but I'm an old person. And I'm quite good at it. I drive them in San Francisco, so that's yeah, I know I'm good at it. But anyone who's had that happen can understand that, who's ever used any kind of gear mechanism in a car, which we don't do anymore really. But it's still existing, it's just a car is doing it itself,

not an automatic. And you can get very complicated with the automatic having to do it, especially with start stop systems that we haven't cars now to save emissions. That's tough, because if you're

a separate small little pump to keep that circulating so that you don't suddenly have high friction at start up again and high wear, because like you said, metal on metal is, you want to avoid that as much as possible. Right. In the book, you explain to how friction is a massive bit over the cause of global warming, speaking of emissions. In order to lower our carbon output, we need to get better at managing friction. And you can get very dirty, very quickly by not managing it correctly.

You write the quote only about 21.5% of the fuel we put in our cars is used to move them,

which is incredible, even as we changed EVs. And that's a slow process, friction caused

rolling resistance, lubrication needs contact, whereas still reduces a car's energy efficiency. Why do we pay more attention? The energy cause caused by friction? And what would it take to significantly reduce vehicle energy usage? And that's ultimately caused by friction. It's a great question. I'm not entirely sure why friction was overlooked for so long. I think it's really because friction overall has just probably been one of the most underappreciated

forces in our lives. As we're getting more and more awareness of it, people are tackling it. And even just from the start of my career to now, I have seen so many more tribology labs show up

in industry that never existed before. And you know, it's sometimes is on glamorous, which might be another thing.

We might efficiency is not glamorous. Yes. And sometimes people like the design of the overall shape of the car, which does help with friction and drag, right? But if we really want to reduce

“and save as much energy as possible, you have to be looking at every little thing that's moving.”

And sometimes that doesn't seem like the sexiest problem to be working on, when in fact, if you're able to reduce the friction and all of those little moving components, even 10% it adds up. Hopefully people have seen this because we've been making great strides in it with the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engine vehicles. You know, these cars are getting any smaller and they're not getting any less powerful. All these things mean the fuel efficiency

should be dropping off quite a bit. But it's not like we're still making improvements. And it's because people are finally noticing friction. We have new lubricants with different viscosity to help optimize that. We have surface texturing. A lot of work has been done there. So if you change the texture of a part and doesn't help trap that lubricant in there and get even lower friction, a lot of actually really clever innovation going on in these small areas that people haven't

really noticed except for the fact that hopefully they're not having to put as much gas in their cars

“they were before. Or else they're like we got plenty of gas who cares, right? That's part of it, right?”

And of course the other impact is rather severe. Anyone who's watched a speed skater knows

what their swimmer, they're always trying to reduce friction. But one of the things that's important

is thinking of friction in cars or anywhere requires systems thinking and that's a more difficult because it crosses so many disciplines of what's happening. Every episode we get an expert to send a question we have to for you. Let's hear the first one. Hi, I'm Adam Becker, author and astrophysicist. My big question for Jennifer is, make sense that studying friction can lead to massive gains in energy efficiency in many different areas. But how do we know that that's actually going to

lead us to use less energy or at least less non-renewable energy? The reason I ask is that there's this thing called Jevon's paradox that says that as you increase efficiency can actually increase the usage of relevant resources, not decrease it. We saw this in the 1800s people got better at using coal more efficiently and that actually led them to burn more coal, not less. And recently we've gotten much better at getting lighting to be much more efficient using LEDs rather than fluorescence

or incandescence, but we don't use less energy on lighting than we used to. So how do we know that efficiency is really going to lead to these massive gains in fighting the climate and energy crisis? Thanks. It's very relevant new data centers, obviously. Yeah, it's a great question and a great point. Part of it, my part of my answer is trying to be my own optimism and a little bit

“that I think every little bit helps and in some cases I 100% agree as we make things more efficient,”

people you give an inch to take a mild type thing. So that may happen. But I personally, my driving habits haven't changed. So the fact that I have a more energy-efficient car means at least my usage, I'm able to save. And if I can multiply that across however many people might be like me, not changing their habits, then you are still saving that chunk. And I think any little bit is worth pursuing

to get all that, not necessarily, but I think it's an opportunity for us to start chipping away at it. But I do think he makes a great point that as we make things more efficient. We have a voracious

appetite. Yes. And I always want more. So if we take Adam's point, let's assume we do want to increase

energy efficiency of excess friction is leading to massive energy losses just in the car category. What's doing on a global scale? What are the highest leverage friction losses if you had to pick

“a short list of climate-relevant friction interventions that scale, what would you prioritize first and why?”

The transportation sector is the biggest offender. And then you obviously can break that into cars and planes. A surprising one is also energy generation, right? So hopefully we will move to renewable, more and more renewables, but in the meantime, even with renewables, we want wind terms to be as efficient as possible. So that the wind that they're getting, they can most

efficiently convert to electricity, not having to deal with the friction in the motors that they're

dealing with. So different ways to chip out there, I think energy production is probably the most surprising areas where friction is a significant factor. And, you know, you have it from traditional power plants where you have, you know, the turbine engines, very similar engines towards an plane, right? And if you can make that as efficient as possible, then you have more efficient energy production. And I do think that that is an opportunity for us to be chipping away at that bigger number.

I mean, I spent chunk of my career just creating materials to actually act in between metal and metal to reduce friction. And the whole point was to make them as small and thin as life's possible, because it's literally every single little ounce is what they're trying to save, because it impacts the efficiency of the airplane. So metal of luggage that we bring, all of that, is taking big impacts on our energy usage. Right. So speaking of planes,

talk about winglets. These are actually making them more energy-efficient. What's a winglet? So if you look at the tips of planes I do this on every plane I go, because they all have something different other tips. You know, there's the little winglet that's arching up, sometimes it's a big loop, sometimes there are little forks on there. They're all different. And these are designed to optimize the airflow around the wings to maximize the lift to drag ratio so that we can minimize the

drag, use the way the air is fully to provide more lift with the tips of the wings. I just think it's really fascinating that we don't seem to have one universal design that seems to be the best,

“but I think that is the inflammation point on why particularly with fluids and fluid friction,”

it's just complicated. It's hard to model that. Right. Do you sit on the wing of every plane you go? I maybe. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from acorns. It's easy to get caught up in the amount of money you have today, but it's important to think about your future finances as well. Acorns is a financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow, and with acorns potential screen

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We sell out and we hope to see you there. So in the last part of the book you start to push on expected territory away from engineering and physics in it topics like medicine and outer space. For example friction plays an important role in biology living things move even at a molecular level. When proteins fold and unfold they're

constantly fighting internal something called molecular friction. What creates internal

friction during protein folding and why does understanding the mechanism matter for designing therapeutics? There's a lot of activity. I just finished a CNN documentary series which includes talking about gene folding and gene editing etc. Yeah I'm like ask your opinion or to correct me if I'm wrong and how I'm is understanding it. I'm I'm no doctor but go I'll try from my interviews. I mean maybe the people you spoke to can help me with this too because it's an

“area that I find fascinating and this is one of these areas where I think the question is”

what role does friction play and how much does it matter? I mean things are moving so we know friction is there but I don't know if we have a clear picture of how big of an influence that has it could be that you know the more friction there is maybe that's causing too much energy to required for folding and maybe it is a reason why sometimes the folding fails. If protein folding fails that can lead to things like Alzheimer's and really serious diseases. So of course we want to

understand everything that goes into the folding but I don't think it's 100% clear the role that friction is playing in that but we know it's moving. You have these molecular chains. You the amino acids as they're connected and start to fold and move they're going to experience friction. Sometimes it's the friction from the turning sometimes it's you energy barriers that they're having to overcome in this process. Different mechanisms involved in that and people are studying different

types of bonds and interactions between the amino acids that might cause more or less friction but the big question is what does that mean on the overall process and I think we're still trying to understand that but if we're trying to model this process to be able to predict it or target therapeutics we need to understand the impact of every variable and friction is one of those variables. Which is why they're using AI to do so because it can do it much quicker. One of the things

of people as much as AI gets deserved attacks for lots of different negative things. One of the positive is the ability to take drug discovery and squeeze the time and the amount of computing that is required to do so in testing which is a big deal meaning they can come up with more therapeutics or they can eliminate therapeutics that don't work very quickly. It usually takes a long time and many you know dead animals essentially but they don't necessarily have to do it. The other

part is I did a lab at Stanford that's doing something called millibots which are tiny little they look like fantastic voyage little tiny things they inject into people's veins and then they

“will get rid of a stroke I had to stroke myself so I that's why I visited it and previously they”

still use using a catheter but catheters have friction against veins are very strong people don't realize how strong veins are but but the catheter can cause damage and if it goes up into a stroke clot and it breaks it apart it can keep going and these millibots don't they just keep going because and they're manipulated by AI magnets and a mapping of your of an individual brain is fascinating but friction is what we talked about the whole time almost the whole time. Yeah I have to look

into that because I'll send you this thing it's a step lab at Stanford but the people working on it interestingly are mechanical engineers working with scientists because it's a mechanical engineering problem really and we're seeing that more and more so my background is in mechanical engineering and actually my professor Greg Sawyer who was running the tribology lab he now runs a department of cancer engineering at the Muffet Research Institute because he has also pivoted that way because

we're seeing so much how there's mechanical engineering that we marry with the biosciences and you

have amazing technology like that and I can see why I virtually do that because if you're trying to

travel through our body and through veins and to target a very specific spot if you run into

what you want and sometimes I remember my professor Greg Sawyer said he would have situations where the scientists would say I was something like that I don't think that's possible but the engineer wouldn't realize that it shouldn't be possible it would just sort of design it based on the

“variables of engineering and it would work so I think it's very exciting what we're seeing with”

the marriage of those disciplines. Absolutely there's a it's a it's magnets is what they use magnets and AI it's really quite crazy and it's eventually they will they will be able to just inject it and then someone in Boston can run the program in an Arkansas right and so you prevent strokes which then leads to all kinds of medical interventions that will cost it to be a safe

money is really what ultimately amazing it is amazing one of the things that my son was working on

as an intern was using a hydrogen in fuel injection engines how you could control the blasts right and how you do and friction plays into huge part in that there's all kinds of and uses of these scenarios a mechanical engineering scenarios are a big part of this which is really interesting and you know of course he has to study chemistry and physics at the same time but it's a really

“interesting multidisciplinary thing now on the other side of the spectrum you have astrophysics”

now interestingly I'm having a doctor ask you an astrophysics question listeners might be surprised to learn there's friction in outer space since it's a vacuum so that that mind let's

play our second expert question. Hello I'm a Zika Lamanio I'm a physician the bioethicis

and a health policy expert and I'd love to ask Jennifer the following big question I've started a lot of chemistry and physics in thinking about space outer space friction is an interesting question in outer space temperatures are very low and there's big vacuums without any molecules between various areas so there's one question that relates to the temperature you can't have liquid lubricants because WD40 would evaporate and freeze so you need solid lubricants what is

a solid lubricant but more importantly in the vast vacuum is there any friction I understand there's quantum friction I'm not sure what that means maybe you can explain to me what quantum friction is but it's not two surfaces rubbing against each other and therefore the question is do you need lubricants for quantum friction and overcoming quantum friction what would that mean for space exploration thank you so okay we'll start with temperature and this all lubrication

and it's not just temperature we temperatures the big one right you can't have it but there's also the radiation going on out there it is the most challenging environment we can have but we still have satellites we have space station out there things are moving and so we do use solid lubricants and the most common ones are it's graphite like you use with your pencil so you have experience you know that graphite moves nights and smooth there's also a momentum dice sulfide and often you

have to use a combination of both because graphite actually really needs water available to it to be able to keep it lubricious because what happens with the solid lubricants you're trying to have the layers of the solid lubricant transfer from the solid red surface to the other surface and then lower the friction but when graphite does that it'll have some guss again chemistry dangling bonds and if it latches on to the wrong thing the friction is actually going to get quite high so

out in space we don't have a lot of water so that's when something like momentum dice sulfide which thrives in that vacuum condition will be able to transfer the layers it has low energy

between its layers to do that gives us the low friction the problem is the most famous solid

over his most controversial one that's Teflon right it seemed like a miracle product but now we're finding it persists forever it was not handled well by the companies making it but that that is a very famous solid lubricant we also have you know researchers all the time developing new composite materials blending different materials to try to get the performance in these extreme conditions because you have extreme high temperatures depending where you're at extreme low temperatures

and you have the radiation and just a crazy environment that we have out there his other question was quantum friction which that would be a bit controversial because technically the definition of

“quantum friction it's very specific variables that you have to have set up has to be in a vacuum”

and you have to have things that are not charged but are polarizable so as the electrons are

fake charge in there water is a good example but you have these conditions on it because if you're

“trying to figure out something's happening at the quantum level you have to remove temperature”

or anything from the environment that might be causing it and so what the theory of this quantum friction is is as you have you know quantum fluctuations the particles jumping in and out of the quantum are they causing drag on each other that would be quantum friction and some some people say yes and they think that they've measured it others are very adamant that this doesn't exist there's not a consensus on it right now it's it can get it to be a bit of a

a feisty category there and it's also one that some people like does it actually matter you know we understand friction more than the macro scale we understand how to work with it do we really need to know in the quantum scale and I think that that's a slightly ignorant view because we've had that view on other forces in the past Van der Waals forces are a good one and those are the forces that cause geckos that's how they can climb up the wall and defy what seems like defy physics so

“I think it's worth pursuing and understanding because we don't know what we don't know”

Ryan and it can tell us a lot about how planets and galaxies evolve correct yes I mean who knows what it could tell us we don't know it can't go or see it all right what is that we're over here trying labs to mimic exactly you get those climbing and that is all due to Van der Waals which at some point people are like all those aren't real who cares about that so I don't know what we don't know about quantum friction or where it could take us I think it's worth pursuing and sometimes

it's worth pursuing some things because of what you discover along the way even if it remains inconclusive so there are other types of friction happening out in space it's a vacuum it's such a dynamic place that of course there's a lot of friction happening it's just not as apparent as state is on planet earth for example so last thing I want to talk about is behavioral friction which we mentioned earlier for example in a more mundane way one click ordering an

Amazon reduces so-called friction a consumer experiences when they're considering whether or not to buy a product that's a very simple way of doing it tech companies obsessive or how to reduce behavioral friction but without it there'd be no creativity no innovation no sex what do you think about non-physical friction what is it something to be designed out of our lives and when is it a feature we should preserve and even add back in the whole point of tech is to

they if they use the word it's when I started to pay attention a friction in this regard they want it frictionless they want to they use the word seamless they have a service called seamless they want it to have no barriers in order to sell you more stuff in order to get you pulled in algorithms or the lack of for it gives you the next thing that you already want it right it's all designed that way and this series I'm doing without friction for example chatbot

that are sycophantic no friction from the chatbot which is always agreeing with you without friction

our cognitive abilities are going to get less and less and our neuroplasticity is going to suffer that friction creates it but we have the whole tech industry trying desperately to get us into a frictionless environment to buy and to respond to chatbots and have relationships with chatbots and you know it's far field but it's the same thing it's the removal of friction as if it's a problem and not an asset can you talk about that yeah they're really they're perfect

metaphors the physical force of friction is obviously quite different but just like if you ignore it's existed and don't fully appreciate it you lose out a lot if we hadn't figured out how to work with friction in the best possible way we would progress and move forward and I keep saying very similar I am worried that as we keep moving towards frictionless and the things we do we're losing our ability to think critically and actually work through

“processes which you know it's exactly what we have to do with the physical friction you have to”

think through the whole system and the process and really understand what you're trying to do when you make it so easy will there's that little bit and the example that I tend to use is with you know GPS and maps of course I love love that use it my car all the time but people make fun of me because I also have an Atlas and physical book of maps in my car and you know so people are like I don't even know how to use these things anymore and that that just worries me

because you know what what if you had up somewhere with no signal or just something happens or your battery dies you need to be able to think your way out of that situation and by making things frictionless I think we're losing like you said some of that cognitive ability and it's also changing behaviors in so many ways because we just expect things like this now it should be easy I shouldn't have to do this we see this when we're providing technical

support for people doing you know engineering scientific problems they just want us to tell

them what the answer is it's like no I I can tell you how to use your instruments to try to get

that answer but I I'm not studying what you're studying I can't give you that answer and so we

everyone wants a way out of the frictionless but you better have friction in companies so that someone can push back and speak up if it's not the best idea or there's another way think creatively like you were saying it's worth stifles creativity if we don't embrace the fact that friction is a good thing yeah it's an interesting thing because I've had so many arguments with tech people about that's and especially right now around chapauts right where it does lead it will

lead to actual cognitive problems with our society not just loneliness but it's trying to they're trying to solve loneliness by creating frictionless partners right which they love to use

“word chapauts which I think is an adorable term for what is a synthetic relationship and everyone”

who is in these I'm like there's nobody there there's nobody there's nothing there and it's designed to to not push back and even though this is sort of a trope for women they get a man who

always responds to them and this is for straight people for a woman and for a man they get a woman

who always agrees with them right and it creates a real problem for not just human propagation but humanity to be able to work together correct when when all the friction is either made hateful which means you don't want to engage in it or the friction is not there you are only with people and you know they're called silos for a reason right you end up with only people who you are in violent agreement with which to me describe silicon valley almost to a T except for

a couple people like this week we've seen it with anthropics saying no we will not be doing that that was a human making that decision not but which is of course the right answer is you're going for efficiency and lack of friction right when I was at a dinner party they they're like well

if someone said how to solve world hunger a bot would say killed 10 million people and and that

would be a good answer it's a way to solve it it's a frictionless solution and so I'm going to stick with this line of thought for the last question but she have this friction as a design choice to friction as a governance choice in complex systems like supply chains electrical birds large tech platform some friction shows up as rules buffers redundancy checks guardrails it slows things down it can also prevent catastrophic failure what's your framework for

deciding where to add those guardrails and slack even if it makes the system less efficient and with more friction how do you tell the difference between healthy friction that provides resilience and dead friction that just waste time and energy I think it goes back to how

“we're talking before taking that systems approach and you have to think of second order consequences”

which is something I'm worried that these frictionless processes we're doing now it's a eliminate our ability to think of second order consequences so you have to sit here and think this is my process I need to put this guardrail up here because if I don't the person operating this machinery could fall in it might be a 1% chance but it is not worth risking that 1% if I remove that guardrail what might happen this speeds up this speeds up but this might happen it's really

thinking consequences of the consequences and I I just think we're seeing more and more that there's a lack of thought around consequences other than the media we're doing this right here now because that will move this one needle and that's all I care about and then you know you have 10 other needles that will start breaking so it's just like with physical friction you have to assess your system and figure out where is the friction where might I accidentally introduce friction if I

change this part and is this friction that is helpful to me is it detrimental to me is it neutral and what can I do about these things and if I do so what happens next it's a very engineering approach

“but I think we have to do that with social and processes and everything in the workplace as well I”

think that's the way to look at things so what do you think about the people running our thought processes right now are running our social or politics or anything else there's a they're very frictionless type of people either you just go along or you they're trying to eliminate it what is the implications for humanity with no friction I think it's very dangerous since the kind of thing that I'll keep me up that night we need that friction if someone has a terrible idea even if it's

well-intentioned I'm not going to get it get it but just just always you're only someone needs to

be able to speak up and push back and provide a little bit of friction if we all just want to be frictionless a terrible decisions will keep being made they will have knock-on consequences that we might not be able to undo we have to be able to develop the skills to have these conversations to accept that friction is okay you know that's a big thing with the chatbots I worry about the ability of people to actually handle human interactions and conversations when they're not easy

because they're mean it's like they're not mean they're just literally challenging your idea

“and giving you a different perspective and you have to have those perspectives or else you just”

end up risking going down a terrible path that you may not be able to hit the brakes on and reverse

it affects everything this is one of the points I'm making in this show is like

“this is actually has longevity implications right you have it will affect the human race in a”

way that and also no one gets to have sex then because guess what's the most friction

felt thing it's sex yep something tribologists have to study to yeah absolutely doesn't design themselves yeah now they don't anyway I really appreciate it generous is a wonderful book

“and it's so well worth reading and such an important issue because as you said it covers so many”

parts of our world and it's a critically important part of us and we should reclaim it from the people to try to take it away from us resistance is progress yeah anyway thank you so we'll be soon it. ball bearing you get a lot of ball bearings if not you get to travel with Elon Musk in space and it's space no one can hear you scream which you will do if you're traveling with Elon Musk go wherever you listen to podcasts search for on with keroswisher and hit follow thanks for

listening to on with keroswisher from podium media New York Magazine the Vox media podcast network and us will be back on Monday with more