Jennifer R. Vail

It's believed to be due to vibrations that friction is causing.

And we know friction causes vibrations with your windshield wipers, speaking of examples that you may not think of.

That is a great friction problem.

You've seen your windshield wipers do that chattering thing when the rain is there, but it's not enough to really lubricate the blade.

It jumps around and it vibrates.

And so if you have vibration, vibrations can cause noise.

We love this when it's an orchestra with a string section because that friction is causing the vibration that creates music.

But in some cases, it might be causing that annoying squeak that you'd rather not hear and then use WD-40 to get rid of the squeak.

Yes, because friction at the end of the day, if it's resisting motion, that's the mechanical energy, right, to move things.

Energy isn't created or destroyed, so we're just converting that energy to a different type, and it's converting that mechanical energy of movement into thermal energy, which is heat.

It can definitely be a problem.

A great example of this is actually going back to Roman chariot racing, where they're going so fast, they had frictional heating that would make the chariot hot for them to stand on.

So to overcome this, they would actually have what I call the first pit stops in documented history.

The chariots would sort of slow down and people would throw water on the chariot to cool it off because otherwise it would be burning your feet.

That is how hot friction can get.

Friction is helping us to understand climate change.

How can friction help us save energy, reduce emissions?

It's also being used to extend life.

And then the new frontiers of it are really trying to use friction to help us uncover clues to understand things like viral infection,

Alzheimer's disease and detecting dark matter.