Imagine driving a car for 20 years and still hearing the original engine purr. Or buying a set of knives that really never needed sharpening. Don't reach for your credit card yet. But recent progress in the field of friction might soon bring these developments to consumers in nearly every market.
Friction exists everywhere surfaces meet.
That's been widely understood, at least writ large, since Leonardo DaVinci. Mark Robbins, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studies tribology - friction, lubrication, and wear. The science has had a major growth spurt in the last decade thanks largely to breakthroughs that allowed researchers to measure forces affecting individual atoms. But there's a lot of physics that happens on the way. In the late 1920s, physicists hypothesized, but couldn't prove, that some solids could move across another solid without any friction.