Have you ever wondered,
what actually drives the universe?..............., what helps nature do its
daily chores? ..............
Yes you guessed it right, it’s the forces that are responsible to do the above jobs, popularly they call it "The laws of physics”. First of all let us understand what a force actually means, it is nothing but a quantity which tends to change the position of the body on which it is acting.
E.g. when you to try to move a heavy stone, you are intended to change the position of the stone by applying a force with your hands.The stone need not move ,but it definitely is acted upon by a force produced by you.
There are various types of force which happen to occur in nature like, gravitational force(causes objects to fall), normal force(one in the above example), magnetic force, spring force,etc. But the most underrated force is the Frictional force. I call this force an underrated force due to the fact that we take this force granted in our day to day life
Now you might wonder, what exactly is this friction force? This force arises when two surfaces are in contact with each other, somewhat provides resistance to motion when in contact.
Try to rub your hands against each other, they will become warm after few seconds. This is the frictional force which causes the heat. Frictional force is present everywhere around us, even the mobile you are holding or the laptop on your lap is experiencing this force.
To quote a dialogue of the movie 3
idiots "Pen ke nib se leke, pant ke zip tak...har jagah friction hai
sir,....up down...up down..."I modified it a bit, but it is as simple as
that.
This force is many times an undesirable force due to the fact it causes wear and tear of the surfaces in contact, but to mention you cannot stop a moving car without friction, which is used when we apply brakes.
This friction also causes wear and tear of the tyres and we need to consume more fuel for overcoming this destructive resistance force. Now one may wonder, what if there was no friction?......wont we need very less fuel to travel?.....imagine we can travel from Mumbai to Goa in only few drops of fuel.......yes we can if there was no frictional force to overcome.
You just need to set a speed and the car will move at that speed continuously till it reaches Goa(provided the road is straight)...isn't that fascinating?...but hold on, one cannot even move the car even a single inch, due to the fact there is no driving force which is provided due to the friction between tyres and road.
The wheels will move, but the car will stand still. Hence, friction force is
very important to carry our daily activities. You cannot even walk without this
force
This force is also
desirable in many applications like brakes as mentioned above, to write on
blackboard with chalk, to sharpen our kitchen knife and so on. Even to light a
simple matchstick you need friction. The most revolutionary discovery of mankind,
to control fire...was possible only due to application of friction. If friction
force had not been there, even the evolution process won’t have taken place.
Now you may agree with
me of how neglected this force is in our day to day life. Friction can be as
constructive as destructive it can be, and one cannot deny the importance of
this , if not in the universe at least on earth and in our life.
