Friction Matters: Resistance Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Hi everyone from New York Magazine in the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with

Carouswisher and I'm Carouswisher. My guest today is Tribologist Jennifer Veil. Tribology

is the study of friction, wear 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

technologies 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, Ezekiel Emanuel. This conversation will leave you feeling

much smarter. It's a kind I really want to do here on On With Carousel. I know I talked 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 so stick around.

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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 a bigger picture

of friction and why you decided to write what is a memoir actually about a scientific thing and

also an emotional thing? Yeah. 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 right

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 science that actually touch on everything. You know, friction is at the

cellular level. It's in 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 its 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 tribology or tribology, however

pronounced it, explain what that is for people. It is the study of friction. Yes, it's the science

of interacting surfaces in relative motion. So we're looking at friction, wear and lubrication

specifically. And you know, if it's a word you haven't heard before, you joined 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 9, 1966 is when that term was coined by home. It was the

editor of the Oxford English Dictionary proposed it. And Peter Joost was heading up this committee

that was looking into failures and manufacturing plants where the equipment was breaking and they

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 around 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 Joost 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 to rub. So we rub things together. You've called yourself

the ambassador for friction. And you say it gets a bad rap. I know we sort of talked about the

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 of friction, a car is friction. Talk about what motivated you to think

about it. You'll motivate me to think about it as I need to start changing perspectives on it

as a tribologist. And I think any tribologist 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

in a minute. 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 biased

against it. And don't realize how necessary it is that it's helping to keep the plates in the

earth stabilized. You know, when 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 wrap. I

agree with you. This is why I loved your book. So a lot of us learn about friction in 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.

In 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 and the simplified models were taught in school.

Yeah, there's one of the many misconceptions of friction. I feel 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,

you know, writing with a pencil, people will think that the friction is just used to lend 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 into 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.

You 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 more sticky with the

content, 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

biologist has been focused specifically on that static friction. When I start up a car,

how much 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, but 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 common sense beliefs that are wrong?

Well, the main one is that friction's bad. Friction is just there, right? We just need to deal with

it. We can manipulate it. Sometimes people think because it's 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 always 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

there, 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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So, you know, one of the themes you come back to in the book is the idea that friction has 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 shipbuilders were engineering boats to

deal with, as you said, drag friction and water. Talk about your favorite moments in history of

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 it in ancient texts 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 a certain distance or laps,

splash water onto the chariot to cool down the frictional heating, which also keeps greases

from igniting. And so, I thought it was really fun that this was essentially the first pitstop

that we had in racing, and it was a necessity because of friction, because things just got very warm.

And 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,

meaning a very heavy statue. And so, some... This is to build a pyramid. In this case, the painting

was moving a large 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 it 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 Air and 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 and a mother. I appreciate that, because

even with all my research, they were never mentioned. Well, they are now at the Air and Space

Museum until, you know, some Trump administration official figures it out, but maybe they're not

able to listen to this. Anyway, talk about ball bearings. It's an underappreciated, but incredibly

important innovation. I mean, these are these little steel balls that are often used in all manner

of mechanical things. Yeah, 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 landlocked lake. There had been rumors of shipwrecks in this. It was Lake Nemi of a

volcanic crater lake. For years and years and years and 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 landlock thing? Well, it turns out Collegula, who was wildly

unpopular, just made giant floating party boats. And on those seemed to have some sort of rotating

platform or stage. Maybe the first rotating club stage, I don't know, but they were 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. 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 them very uniform and smooth. 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 what friction means, they probably picture

two solids rubbing, right? Fluid friction is where things get complicated though. When do people

start to study the undershadowed commas like flow, viscosity, turbulence? And what did that unlock?

Yeah, I love where friction takes you since it's everywhere. And one of the big breakthroughs with

understanding friction and 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 hydraulics

engineer, Gautier Hagen, looking at how to move river water through pipes. And then I'm going to

put your name Puysoo, who was studying blood. So you have blood and you have pipes. Bath at

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 in contact, how does the fluid

even get in between that contact? That's what we want to do 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

with waters in cities, 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 that'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 our 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 houses. That's the case. If people don't drink

enough water, for example, it 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 metals from destroying each other,

because a lot of the industrial solution is metal upon metal. We learn about the advances in

iron production steam engines, machine tools and factories. Their unsung here as an industrial

revolution was 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 when we get into lubrication,

it gets complicated fast. So what a lubricant can do, obviously the goal is to completely separate

those solid contacts. Two metals, for example. Yes. Are two metals. 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 then 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 think anyone does anymore, but I'm an old person and I'm quite good at it. I drive them

in San Francisco. So yeah, I know. I'm good at it. But anyone who's had that app and 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 automatic.

And it can get very complicated with the automatic having to do it, especially with start stop

systems that we have in cars now to save emissions. That's tough because if you're starting and stopping,

where's the lubricant going? So they've actually most systems now will have 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 and metal is you want to avoid that as much

as possible. Right. In the book, you explain how friction is a massive but overlooked cause of

global warming, speaking of emissions. In order to lower our carbon output, we need to get better

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've changed EVs, and that's a slow process, friction caused rolling resistance,

lubrication needs contact, whereas still reduces a car's energy efficiency. What we pay more

attention, the energy caused caused by friction. And what would it take to significantly reduce

vehicle energy usage if 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 it sometimes is on glamorous, which might be another thing we might see 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 sexy as 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.

These cars aren't getting any smaller and they're not getting any less powerful. All of these

things mean the fuel efficiency should be dropping off quite a bit, but it's not. 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, does it 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? Of course the other impact is rather severe.

Anyone who's watched a speed skater knows what they're swimmer, they're always trying to reduce friction.

But one of the things that's important is thinking about friction in cars or anywhere requires

systems thinking and that's a more difficult process so many disciplines of what's happening.

Every episode we get an expert to send us a question we have two for you. Let's hear the first one.

Hi, I'm Adam Becker, author and astrophysicist. My big question for Jennifer is,

makes 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

Geven'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 data centers obviously. Yeah, it's a great question and a great

point. Part of it, my answer is probably 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, they take a mile type thing. So that may happen. But I personally, my driving

habits have it 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 and worth putting towards that battle. There's maybe the 20% available. Do

I believe we'll be able 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. 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 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. So hopefully we will move to renewable, more and more renewables. But in the meantime,

any even with renewables, we want wind turbines to be as efficient as possible so that they,

what 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 one of 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 to what's in a 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 a 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 those airplanes. So metal 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 planet going because they all have something different on the tips.

You know, there's the little winglet that's arcing up. Sometimes it's a big loop. Sometimes

there's little forks on there. They're all different. And these are designed to optimize the

air flow around the wings to maximize the lift to drag ratio so that we can minimize the drag,

use, you know, the way the air is flowing 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 estimation point on why particularly with fluids and fluid friction,

it's just complicated. It's hard to model that. Right. You sit on the wing of every plane. You go

and maybe we'll be back in a minute.

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joinmitty.com. That's join m-i-d-i.com. So in the last part of the book, you start to push on

expected territory away from engineering and physics and at 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 docu-series, which includes talking about gene folding and gene editing, etc.

Yeah, I might ask your opinion or to correct me if I'm wrong in how I'm just understanding it.

I'm no doctor, but I'll try from my interviews. But go ahead.

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

the more friction there is, maybe that's causing too much energy to require 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, the amino

acids as they're connected and start to fold and move. They're going to experience friction.

And sometimes it's the friction from the the turning. Sometimes it's, you know, 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

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 that 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 tidings, they inject into people's

veins and then they will get rid of a stroke. I had a stroke myself, so that's why I visited it

and previously they, they still use using a catheter, but catheters have friction.

Against veins are very strong. People don't realize how strong veins are, 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, man, I have to look into that because I'll send you

the thing. It's a 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 terminology lab, he now runs a department of cancer

engineering at the Moffitt Research Institute because he is 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 friction would 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

too much friction or you don't quite have the flow, right, it's not going to be able to deliver

what you want. And sometimes I remember my professor, Greg Sawyer said he would have situations where

the scientists would say, oh, something like that, I don't think that's possible, but the engineer

wouldn't realize that it shouldn't be possible and 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. It's magnets is what they use magnets in AI. It's really quite crazy

and it's eventually 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 to be very safe money is really ultimately amazing. It is amazing.

One of the things that my son was working on as an intern was using 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 and mechanical engineering scenarios are

a big part of this, which is really interesting. And you know, of course, he has a study chemistry

in physics at the same time, but it's a really interesting multidisciplinary thing. Now in 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 in mind, let's play our second expert question.

Hello. I'm Ezekiel Emanuel. I'm a physician, a bioethicist, and a health policy expert.

And I'd love to ask Jennifer the following big question. I've studied a lot of chemistry

in physics and 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

WD-40 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 the solid lubrication.

And it's not just temperature. I mean, temperature's a 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 stations out there. Things are moving. And so we do use

solid lubricants. And the most common ones are its graphite, like you use with your pencil. So you

have experience. You know that graphite moves nights and smooth. There's also molybdenum disulfide.

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 lubricant surface

to the other surface and then lower the friction. But when graphite does that, it'll have some

glycegen 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 molybdenum disulfide, 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 probably the most famous solid lubricant is the 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 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 one can be a bit

controversial because technically the definition of quantum friction, it's very specific

variables that you have to have set up, has been a vacuum, and you have to have things that are

not charged, but are polarizable. So as the electrons are floating in their cloud, you might have

more on one side than the other, and it's a 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 have

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 to be a bit of a feisty category there. And it's also one that some

people like, does it actually matter? You know, we understand friction, more on the macro scale,

we understand how to work with it. Do we really need to know on 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

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 to five physics. So I think it's worth pursuing

an understanding, because we don't know what we don't know. Right. 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. Geckos people. Right. Geckos. What is that? And we're over here trying and labs to mimic

exactly Geckos climbing. And that is all due to Van der Waals, which at some point people are like,

oh, 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. But there

are others 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 it 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 on Amazon reduces so-called

friction of consumer experiences when they're considering whether or not to buy a product.

That's a very simple way of doing it. Tech companies obsess over 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? When 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, if they use the word,

it's when I started to pay attention to friction in this regard. They want it frictionless.

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 are the lack of,

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, chatbots 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 I know it's

far afield, 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 existing 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 wouldn't 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 is 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, we lose that little bit.

And the example that I tend to use is with GPS and maps. Of course, I 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 some people are like, I don't even know how to use these things anymore.

And that just worries me because what if you end 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. And it's like, no, I can tell you how to use your instruments to try to get that

answer. But I'm not studying what you're studying. I can't give you that answer. And so we lose a lot

of productivity, a lot of thinking skills. And it, it seeps into the organizational structure.

Everyone wants a way on to be 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 sort of 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 this. And especially right now around chatbots, 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 their chatbots, 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, 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 in your, and they're, you know, they're called

silos for a reason, right? You end up with only people who you're in violent agreement with,

which to me describes 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 a bot, which is, of course, the right answer if you're going for efficiency and

lack of friction. Right. When I was at a dinner party, they're like, well, if someone said,

how to solve world hunger, a bot would say kill 10 million people. And, and that would be a good

answer, right? 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 shift is friction as a design choice to friction

as a governance choice in complex systems like supply chains, electrical goods, large tech platforms,

some friction shows up as rules, buffers, redundancy checks, guard rails, it slows things down. It can

also prevent catastrophic failure. What's your framework for deciding where to add those guard

rails and slack, even if it makes the system less sufficient. And with more friction, how do you

tell the difference between healthy friction that provides resilience and dead friction that just

wastes 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 are doing now. It's eliminating 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

guard rail 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 guard rail, what might happen?

This speeds up, this speeds up, but this might happen. It's really thinking of the consequences.

Of the consequences, and I just think we're seeing more and more that there's a lack of thought

around consequences other than the immediate. We're doing this right here now because that will move

this one needle and that's all I care about. And then you have 10 other needles that all 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, running our social or politics or everything

else? They're very frictionless type of people. Either you just go along or they're trying to

eliminate it. What is the implications for humanity with no friction? I think it's very dangerous

and it's the kind of thing that'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 you to put just just

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, 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. 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. I hear it even in the workplace sometimes like, well,

I don't want to have that conversation because they're mean. 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. This is actually has longevity implications. 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-filled thing? It's sex.

Something tribologists have to study too. Yeah, absolutely. They don't. Anyway,

I really appreciate it. Jenner's 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

critically important part of us and we should reclaim it from the people are trying to take it away

from us. Resistance is progress. Progress, yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Today's show is produced by Christian Castro-Vicell, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Milsopp, Megan

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