Atoms slip against one another, eventually sticking in various combinations. Tectonic plates do the same, sliding across each other until they stick in a stationary state. Everything from the tiniest ...

I learned to respect friction, as a phenomenon with many nuances, when I was a graduate student. One day, while teaching a problem session in elementary mechanics, I unwisely invented a new problem to ...

The upper figure shows the viscoelastic toy model proposed here, characterized by only six independent parameters. Surprisingly, this simple mechanical model produces complicated system dynamics, as ...