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Dr. Jennifer Vail
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Jennifer Vail
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jennifer Vail about her book titled A Biography published by Harvard University Press in 2026. Now, obviously from that title we know what we're going to be talking about, right? And friction is often thought about in terms of thing something that is difficult or complicated or causing problems. Maybe that's I mean, that's probably true in some senses, but friction is also really necessary for like lots of things to actually work, as we're probably going to discuss in this conversation. So we're talking about it to some extent metaphorically, but also like actual science here, which is fascinating for me as a historian who, I admit right off the bat, not a scientist at all to learn more about. So Jennifer, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about Friction.
- [02:27]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What are you hoping readers take away from this biography of friction?
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Dr. Jennifer Vail
Yeah, so as you said, I'm Jennifer Vail and I'm a tribologist, which is a fancy word for someone who, as you correctly alluded to, studies friction. I spent a lot of time in a lab rubbing things together, and I wrote this book because it just became apparent to me in my career that friction has a story to tell. I realized early on as a tribologist, how ubiquitous friction is and actually found the reach of friction to be amazing. And it does touch everything that's moving. So it has taken us on a journey, and we've been on a journey with friction, from creating fire to quantifying it, formalizing a science around it and understanding it enough to be able to use it as a tool, which is why it became Friction A biography. And my hope with the book is to help change a little bit of the perception of friction. As you said, there's a little bit of a negative connotation around it because it's a physical force that resists motion, but it is necessary. And it's also quite powerful and pretty amazing, as I said, how many things it's involved in.
- [03:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think people definitely get a much better sense of just how many errors friction shows up in after reading this book, and I think also after listening to our conversation, too. So I think where I want to start is with a question of origins. I admit, as a historian, I love words. And so before we get into all the, like, sciency science, I'd love to talk about the word tribologist, because that's quite fun, really. Where do we see the origins of this sort of field of study? I mean, there's one case in the book that we can look to sort of the 1960s, when we see lots of academic disciplines being sort of formalised. Or we can go back to da Vinci, or we can go back further to the ancient Sumerians. Like, where does this cool word that you are part of come from?
- [04:32]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
It's a great question and actually a pretty complicated one, so I will start with the word itself. So tribology as a word, as a science, was formalized in the 1960s. So in that sense, it's a pretty new, pretty young, modern science. The word came about because a group of scientists and engineers got together. They were looking at how machinery just kept failing in plants, and they thought maybe it was a lubrication problem. But as this committee started to dig into it, they realized it was much more complex than that. It was a combination of the fact that these machines had been designed at a time where they were not expected to run almost continuously. So part of it was part design, part of it was material selection for the machinery itself. Part of it was the lubricant being used, as well as maintenance procedures and really the education around all of that. So the committee realized this is actually a science in itself that we need to dedicate people and effort to understanding. So lubrication was not an, you know, a term that encompassed enough. It was limiting. So the head of that committee, Peter Jost, actually reached out to a connection he had, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. And it was basically just saying, hey, here's this field of science that we want to have a name for. Can you help us out? And the editor proposed tribology. It has Greek origins. Tribose means to rub. And, you know, the editor was like, greek origins really tend to go over well with sciences. So maybe try this. Correctly guessing that some people would push back a bit on why are we naming this new science. But the term was adopted and the word tribology came to be, and so did the field itself. So I always think that's kind of a fun story about the word itself. The second half of your question is really, when did tribology itself start? We didn't have the word until the 1960s, but the science of tribology actually did start earlier. We could look at examples from ancient civilizations where they were manipulating friction. But if we look at it from a formalized science, when experiments were being run, people were quantifying things. That's really what I would say starts with da Vinci. To most of us in tribology. He is our founding father of the field, and his notebooks are fascinating period. But it's amazing because he actually has sketches of what we would call a tribometer, the instrument to study the friction. He sketched them out. He has clear depictions of the experiments he ran, what he was looking at. He quantified friction, and he actually developed what are now our first two laws of friction. But the problem is da Vinci didn't publish. So we did lose this knowledge for about a hundred years until Guillaume Amontans was later doing some similar work and luckily came to the same conclusions as da Vinci and publicized his work. So really, the science of tribology started long before the term came about. But lots of interesting origins all around.
- [07:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Yeah, those are two fun stories. Are the ancient Sumerians a third?
- [07:46]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Yeah, we can look at ancient Sumerians, ancient Egyptians, ancient Romans. There's examples throughout all of them where they were utilizing ways to manipulate friction. Even if they didn't notice it. So pottery wheels are one of the first great examples. Wheels are a classic tribology problem and application. The wheel itself is used to minimize friction with whatever it's rolling against. And Sumerians were using pottery wheels, which naturally were lubricating themselves because you use water so much with pottery. So they were able to spin very freely. When wheels were adapted for transportation, and you had the wheel and axle, they didn't have the water, you know, flooding that contact. So it had to figure out other ways to lubricate that contact so that the wheel can move against the axle and you could roll so water doesn't stick around. Couldn't really use that. They would switch to ancient animal fats to use as greases. Lards were great for this. And so that's what you would see on something like Roman chariots.
- [08:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. Yeah, that's helpful to kind of start to connect these sorts of applications. And of course, the key thing that connects all of these different things are the laws of friction. So what are they and how do we get them?
- [08:59]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
So the first law of friction is that friction is proportional to the normal force. And the best way to really picture this and to describe it is to just think of a book on a table and you want to slide the book across the table. So friction is going to obviously act opposite of the sliding motion of the table. So in that horizontal direction, that so called normal force that friction is proportional to would be perpendicular to the direction of motion. So with our book example, the normal force is the vertical force. And in this case it would just be the weight of the book. You could press down on the book to increase that vertical load or even stack more books on top of it. So you're increasing the normal load. And as you do that, you can imagine it's harder to push the book across the table. That's because that friction is going to be proportional to whatever your normal load is. Now, if you were to change the size of the book, make it three times the size, but it still weighs the same, Friction actually isn't going to change. And that's our second law. Friction is independent of that apparent area of the object in contact. It's really easy to think that if you have a smaller book, you'll have less friction. But if that book weighs the same as a larger book, it's going to experience the same resistance to motion, the same force of friction. So independent of contact area, but proportional to the normal force. The third law is one that I will Just be transparent about and say it gets broken. So it's sort of. Some people say it's not really a law, but it is listed frequently as a law. And it's stating that friction is independent of velocity. If I slide that book really fast across the table, it's going to have the same friction as going really slowly. However, as I said, this one does get broken, Especially as you start moving to really high speeds. Just because when you start moving things pretty fast, friction, the heating can be significant enough that actually you could sometimes have localized melting. It could change how the structure of your material is, which can change friction. And if you have fluids at different speeds, the friction can be much more sensitive to that speed. So the third law holds up in a lot of cases. But it does get broken, which I appreciate is not usually the case when we talk about laws and sciences.
- [11:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
But, I mean, I come from law and social sciences. So that part seems more. I can work with that better.
- [11:22]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Maybe a lot of scientists would be like, well, why is it called a law then? It's a fair question. And my favorite part about that law is that it's attributed to Coulomb. And even he and his experiments has documentation saying in certain cases, the friction was changed with velocity. So I sometimes question how this actually became a law and attributed to him when he himself had said friction can sometimes depend on velocity. But here we are.
- [11:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that is definitely interesting. Can you tell us more about kind of how friction works? I mean, you talk in the book, for example, about some key mechanisms.
- [11:58]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Sure. When we think about mechanisms of friction, it really tends to boil down to two different mechanisms. Especially when we were talking about solid objects and contact. So when we're talking about solids, we're looking at those surfaces that are in contact as they're moving. And when you look at a surface, it doesn't really matter how smooth you think it is. It actually has hills and valleys in that surface. So when you contact a surface, it's those hills that first make contact. And we have to look at how those hills are contacting and trying to move. If the hills are in contact with other hills on another surface. And they have adhesively bonded together, basically gotten stuck together. You have to break the adhesive bond in order to move. So friction is that breaking of the bond. That's the resistance that you're getting. So the amount of energy it takes to break that bond. Is how much energy you have to put into overcoming the friction. The other type of mechanism you can see with these hills and valleys One of the hills will push up against another and actually bend that hill and deform it enough until one of the surfaces can start sliding over it. And sometimes it deforms it enough to actually break that hill on the surface. And that's what leads to wearing out the material and debris. But this type of mechanism is called deformation friction because it's the energy and the force required to deform the surfaces enough for them to start moving.
- [13:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Okay, that's helpful to understand. Is everything, though, that we're talking about so far for solids, or do we see friction in liquids and gases too?
- [13:35]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
That is a great question. And as I said, friction is ubiquitous. So it is definitely there with liquids and gases in general. Solids are going to have higher friction when they're moving against each other than if you put a liquid lubricant in between them or even air in between them. This is why we put things like grease on our bike chains, because it makes things move easier. It lowers the energy because we're separating those solid hills and can remove some of the resistance that comes from those solid surfaces being in contact. But fluids themselves are quite complicated. We have, you know, the liquids and gases which have resistance to flow, which is called viscosity. And viscosity is actually internal friction. So within the water, flowing within the air or whatever fluids we're talking about, they have internal friction that will help dictate their flow behavior. Water has very low internal friction. You know this. It flows very easily. We always use honey as the example at the opposite end of the spectrum has very high internal friction. It doesn't really want to flow that easily. Whereas solids, we're always thinking about those hills and valleys and contact points. Fluids, it's all about how things flow. The flow of water around a boat is going to produce drag, for example. The flow of air around an airplane or a car produces drag as well. So we have to design with that in mind to try to reduce drag. So flow gets complicated pretty fast. And that's why you have specialists in engineering who will focus on literally nothing but flow around either the car or the plane that they are working on designing.
- [15:14]
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Interesting. Yeah, that does seem like in obviously those cases being a very important area to have specialists in. If we're thinking, then, about what ubiquitous means, is that just Earth, or do we see friction if we extend that into space?
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Dr. Jennifer Vail
Friction is definitely in space. Space may be a vacuum, but it's an incredibly dynamic place, right? And there's lots of movement going on. And where there's movement, there's friction. There is, of course, the traditional friction. When we have any machinery in space or equipment, rockets, satellites, the space station, all of these things have moving parts that will experience the friction that we just talked about. And that is such an extreme environment. We've had to engineer new materials and use solid lubricants to actually make sure everything can move out there. But space also has other types of friction. I just mentioned drag. Gaseous planets will experience drag from the gases that they have swirling around in them. But we get friction from gravitational interactions between objects. There's a couple of types of friction that these interactions can produce. If we look at our own Earth moon system, you know, we have tides. There's a tidal force that's coming between that gravitational interaction between. We see our oceans moving because the tide, well, there's, of course, resistance to that material. This case the ocean moving. That is called tidal friction. And if you actually look at the Earth's rotation over time, it is starting to slow down. And tidal friction is paying, you know, acting as a brake on that rotation. The other type of friction that can come about in space with gravitational interaction and is called dynamical friction. And this is where you have objects in space that are moving and passing by each other. The larger object will obviously have the stronger gravitational traction pulling things towards it. And as it pulls a smaller object towards it, that smaller object actually can create basically, a drag on the larger object. And that drag is what we call dynamical friction.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. Going from the very, very large of all of space to the much more human size, literally. Is there friction inside the human body?
- [18:15]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
There are a lot of places for friction in the human body. We have so much movement going on inside our bodies. They really are amazing machines. And there's a few really interesting examples. I can think of one. I think a lot of people will be familiar with it's one of the most famous examples of friction getting some bad publicity, I think. And it came from the unfortunate hip replacement recalls that were about a decade ago now. So these were hip implants that were starting to fail in patients and were getting very painful, and there was higher friction and wear than expected in these implants. So they had to be recalled. Patients had to undergo, you know, another surgery. It was very painful. It's the opposite of what you want to happen. But now, you rarely ever hear about that problem. It was long ago. We're not seeing repeats of it. And it's because we have a better design, better materials, and crucially, a better way of testing so that we can make sure the designs are replicating what we see in the body. Because friction can be a bit pesky in that way. You really do have to mimic your application so you can accurately have the friction in your lab that you would see in the application. So I think that's an example that people may have heard about. It was all over the news. But we have friction inside our bodies all the way down to the cellular level. For example, protein folding is a very dynamic process, and it's a critical biological process. Sometimes these proteins actually fail at folding, and this is a huge area of active research because these failed proteins can actually be toxic.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
They.
- [19:55]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
They're believed to be behind diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. So researchers are trying to accurately model protein folding so we can understand how they fail. And since it's a dynamic process, friction is involved in this. And the question is, what role is friction playing? How big of a role? Is it a variable that is playing a significant part? Is it a variable that can somehow be tweaked through therapeutics, or is it just something we need to make sure that we quantify enough to have it in the model to accurately represent it? So it's an ongoing area of research, but a very fascinating example of friction in our bodies. I could go on for another one. Hope you don't mind. Please. I also think it's fascinating to think that friction could be potentially used in other therapeutics with viruses in bacteria. So you have two types of infection. You can have a latent infection, which is something kind of like chickenpox, where the virus stays in your body, lays dormant, and it could flare up anytime you have a lytic infection, which is the active, you know, cells attacking in the immune system. And so with therapeutics for, you know, if it's a bacterial infection, you could potentially have a good bacterium that you want to introduce into the system to attack the not so good bacteria, in which case you want to make sure you have a lytic infection so it's attacking it. And researchers have found that the rate at which the bacteria ejects from the capsule that contains it, that rate will actually determine what type of infection it has. And so we have a ejection velocity. You can probably imagine where this is going. Friction is involved in that ejection. So this is an opportunity for us to potentially use friction. We can increase friction in that ejection velocity to enable the type of infection where the good bacteria can correctly battle and overcome the negative bacteria that we're after. And they found, you know, ways of coiling the strands of DNA of the bacteria so that the coiling produces more friction and slows down the ejection, which I just think is a really cool way of thinking about friction as a positive thing, since we hear about it so often as a negative.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that seems like the coolest area of research out of all the ones you've mentioned so far. Obviously that's my bias, but yeah, glad you added that one in because that's pretty cool. Thinking about some other things that you've mentioned so far, I want us to go into a bit more detail about. You've given a number of examples around lubrication. Can you tell us more about what are ones that kind of work and don't either now or that have been.
- [22:38]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Tried over these centuries? Sure. I can actually circle back to use the corporate speak word to the Roman chariots, because I think this is a surprisingly complex and fascinating problem. As I said, water was often used as lubricant. We still do this today, but it just does not stick around. It dries out pretty fast. So these chariots were using animal fats and natural waxes. And the thing with greases, and this holds with modern greases as well, they can heat up to a point where they will actually ignite, which is obviously something you want to avoid. And there are actually documents in ancient Roman history. As a historian, you'll probably love this too, where they describe the glowing red of these chariots and the warmth on the driver's feet. So this is not what we like with friction. Sometimes we want it warming us up, but not in this case and not when you have greases there that might ignite. So what the Robins actually figured out to do was after, you know, a certain number of laps, they will throw a bucket of water onto the chariot to cool the whole thing down. This would prevent it from glowing red, you prevent your ignition temperature, and you keep the poor driver's feet cool. So I think that that's a really great example of having to tweak your lubrication system. Even back with chariot racing, and I liken that to, this is probably our first pit stop type thing, right. They're doing maintenance on the chariots as they're being used. But we've obviously come a long way with modern lubrication. The fluids in your car no longer have to be winterized. Right. They're designed to remain fluid and lubricious under a much wider temperature range. There's a lot of research and work that went into that. Those fluids are also a much lower viscosity than they used to be. And since they have lower viscosity, they flow easier. So there's less energy required to flow them and it helps keep things lubricated easier. We design composite materials where we can tweak the ingredients to optimize things like friction and other properties for whatever that end use is. And scientists and engineers have developed ways to create incredibly thin coatings on the atomic and nanoscale, which use solid lubricants, materials like molybdenum, disulfide, graphite, and different composites of those solid lubricants. They put super small, thin coatings onto micro actuators that are actually inside all of our electronic devices. So these advances with friction have really helped enable the technology that we use and take for granted every day.
- [25:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, that definitely goes back to what you were saying about ubiquitous earlier. But with all of these different options, how are decisions made about kind of which lubricant works best for which purpose? Like, is it a trial and error sort of thing? If so, what do those trials look like? Like, how do we sort of mix and match these pieces?
- [25:39]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
It's a great question, and I'm sure tribologists drive people crazy because we are really the masters at saying, well, it depends on. And then we ask a bunch of questions to try to understand what you're trying to do, that you need to lower the friction, or in some cases maybe you need more friction, like with braking. So we'll ask a lot of questions about the end use. Are we talking about a car that's going to be experiencing scorching temperatures in the summer to below freezing in the winter? Or is it a manufacturing piece of equipment that's in a temperature controlled warehouse? Are we talking about a linkage operating in a vacuum environment or a corrosive environment? So we have an idea of even the environmental conditions. We then start talking about. All right, so we have our temperatures, we have if it's going to be corrosive, well, what kind of forces, what kind of speeds would be part of this problem? And then we can start to select the right lubricant for that. You know, if, if I know I'm helping a customer who's designing a part in a jet engine, I know that's going to get quite hot. So I'm not going to suggest a liquid lubricant. I will start looking at the varieties of solid lubricants. Then I will probably make a composite, mix a few options together to try to get a combination of properties, and then put it on a turbometer that can best mimic those conditions and sort of do a proof of concept. That's if it's, you know, a new application. In some cases, we can hear enough about the application conditions and say, oh, yeah, you should definitely use this lubricant. Just point them straight there. But if we're developing something completely new, then, yeah, we'll go into the lab and replicate everything as much as we can. Check out the friction that we're seeing as well as the wear. Those tend to go hand in hand and recommend the best combination for, for the application itself.
- [27:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That sounds quite fun, really, to kind of always be tinkering around and figuring out what would work best. And we've already had you talk about some examples, right, like pit stops, ancient and current, cool things around, you know, what's happening inside the body. Talked about space. One thing we haven't talked about yet, though, that you mention in the book, is how studying friction might be able to help with climate change.
- [27:56]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Yes. So as much as I am trying to convey that friction isn't actually an antagonist in our world, we can't hide from the fact that it does dissipate energy away from mechanical motion, is resisting that. It converts the mechanical motion into thermal energy. That is great when we're trying to warm up our hands or even play a violin, but it's not always what we're after. When we're driving the car, we want our fuel to be spent mostly on moving us forward, not having to overcome friction. We want to machine parts without having to waste energy to machining them. So as a result of all that, it's understood to be about 20% of our global energy consumption is dealing with overcoming friction. And some of that might be necessary, like with braking and generating heat intentionally. But even if we remove that, there's still going to be a significant chunk of energy in our annual consumption coming from friction. So by identifying these opportunities where we can reduce friction, such as in our car or in those manufacturing warehouses, we can actually save a lot of energy as well as a lot of emissions. And we have already seen and experienced some of the benefits of the tribological research in this area. Over a decade ago, at least one third of the fuel that you would put in your car was actually being spent on friction. Now you've seen the miles per gallon has gone up in traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. They are more efficient, despite the fact that actually cars have gotten bigger and heavier. So it seems like, oh, how do we make them more efficient? Well, a lot of that came from the tribological advances. Advances in lubrication techniques, lubrication, materials, part design. They're doing things like surface texturing to help enable even lower friction and keep lubricants in place when the car stops. So we've seen the benefits of what tribological research can do, and that is why it's such a powerful tool to use friction and look at friction as a way to reduce our energy consumption.
- [30:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that would have a big impact indeed. Certainly ticking off a lot of big ticket items then, with the topics we've covered. Is there anything else you hope readers take from the book that we haven't mentioned yet that you want to throw in?
- [30:15]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
I think I just like people to start seeing the world around them with a little bit of the lens of friction. Like, oh, hey, we're watching the Winter Olympics. There's so much turbology and so much friction in there. And that friction is actually going to be the difference between a gold and silver medal and the different type of research that goes into the materials and design of skis. And curling. Curling is my favorite tribological problem, if I'm being honest. So just having that sort of fun view of where friction is, appreciating it, and hopefully not having the little bit of that. That negative connotation that comes with it. That especially starts, you know, as soon as you're introduced to it in school, at least my experience was we're going to ignore friction. So this is an ideal problem. Yeah. It might not be ideal having friction there, but it is there. And it is kind of a fun thing to look at and start to think about all the different ways it's influencing your life every day.
- [31:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, I have to ask. Why is curling your favorite tribological problem?
- [31:17]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Yeah, I mean, I. I always wanted my labs to do like team building, actually going curling. And I finally did get the chance to join a curling league. But it's really interesting because if you want to dig into it, there isn't really a general consensus about how they can get the really low friction between the start stone and the ice. And sometimes it's gotten pretty lively with different schools of thought that people have on, you know, the way that you. You throw it and can actually curl the stone and how the dynamics are working. So I kind of love that there's a little bit of controversy around it. And it. It encompasses all the big aspects of friction in a tribology problem. They actually pebble the surface of the curling rinks, so they're not the smooth ice that you would expect in an ice hockey game. Right. They have a surface texturing, which always complicates things. And there's so much surface science in tribology. And that's what the sweepers are doing. Right. They are actually using frictional heating to melt a little bit of that pebbling to change what that surface is so that they can try to control the speed by controlling the friction. So everything about curling is really going down to the friction.
- [32:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And.
- [32:32]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
And it's in just such an interesting way of doing it because you have the person throwing the stone and then the sweepers, and it's fascinatingly complex and a little controversial about how does it all work.
- [32:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a pretty good answer. I'm definitely going to look at curling at the Olympics a little differently in a few weeks, so thank you for that. What, may I ask, will you be doing now that this book is out? Besides, of course, watching curling? Anything currently on your desk or in your lab you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [33:00]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
For now, I just focused on sort of being the ambassador for friction, and it's just such a great story that I'm wrapping up with a bow right now. I have a couple things that have sparked my interest to be working on and potential new ideas for books to start researching. But they're a little too early for me yet to know where they will go. So a little bit more of just carrying on as is, and as you said, watching curling at the Olympics.
- [33:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, if anyone needs a break from curling, they can, of course, read the book we've been discussing titled A Biography, published by Harvard University Press in 2026. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [33:38]
Dr. Jennifer Vail
Thank you so much, Miranda.
- [33:51]
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