Man good luck trying to put that thing together on your living room floor! Unless you keep the pieces all in the box and remove as needed, they’ll be all over the place. I think the table would feel just like oil, but with no residue. Or, like two wet ice cubes rubbed together but without the cold.
Aye, there’s the rub! If you’re on the skids, you can scrape up a little unobtanium, and unless you hit a snag, you’ll do just grate and you’ll graze in clover! Somehow, that just chafes, you know?
In my experience, I have used wishalloy fasteners to hold my unobtainium fixtures together.
Well, if all else fails, you could still make cuts in it with an industrial laser. I’ll just assume we’re not on a budget for this particular project.
The feeling should come close to walking on a vat of mercury. Only instead of not sinking in deeply, you wouldn’t sink in at all on your table.
You need about six or eight more 'o’s in there to be scientifically accurate.
Smoooooooooth!
I agree: it would feel really, really, really, slippery, but not greasy.
No particular reason for it to feel cold, though. Depends on whether the heat conductivity of unobtanium is closer to metal (it would feel cold) or plastic (warm).
(The room-temperature superconducting table will feel cool to the touch, though).
If the entire thing is frictionless unobtanium (I assume it’s like aluminum, and there’s a layer of unobtanium oxide on the outside, which is the frictionless part), then screws or worse nails won’t work. Bolts and nuts (of normal metal) would work though (the nut and bolt need to have friction against each other, but not the material in between).
Putting it together is going to be a little tricky, but do-able. To pick any pieces up, you’ll have to grab them on opposite corners (or use a wall or something), otherwise they’ll just slide away along the floor.
Like picking up a wet ice cube (minus the cold).
Hooray! See, that right there is a useful answer.
Well, that’s a great question, and I’m not sure there is an answer - mechanical interlocking is a component of friction at any scale… I think…
Not really, we haven’t got any wishalloy stockists round here.
You would not be able to walk on it. You would step on and slide to the opposite side, possibly on your arse, after flailing about a bit, or possibly still standing up if you could manage to keep your legs fairly rigid.
I want some to make runners for a warm-weather sledge.
Frictionless table + cat = entertainment.
Huh. I turned to the great & powerful Wiki, which has this unexplained tidbit:
The first reference leads to this:
Who knew? I sure didn’t – my high school physics teacher was a football coach who needed some teaching hours.
Hmmmm… OK, except that this explanation does rather seem to gloss over the fact that rough surfaces, like sandpaper, are in fact quite good at inhibiting sliding motion. Seems odd to be explaining why something doesn’t happen, when it does
I mean, it may not be friction, proper, but when I slide two pieces of sandpaper against each other, the energy lost in making the grains ride up over each other is not gained as they slip back down the other side - it ain’t that simple
I happened to recently attend a talk by one of the guys whose working with this version of stickiness. He’s looked at gecko footpads and so forth. His microscopic views of these pads shows them to be made of tightly packed columns that are able to sway somewhat, and where the ends of these columns, which tend to be flattened, come into contact with the surface of another material, they adhere by the same process as adhesive tape, i.e. the natural adhesion of one material for another, such as water and, say, cloth. I presume that the update on the textbook is referring to that type of friction, where some force would have to overcome the natural adhesion between materials. On the other hand, we all know that it’s harder to drag a box across the carpet than it is to drag it across the kitchen floor, so roughness certainly seems to be a factor.
Sure. Just drill your holes from the other, nonfrictionless side.
I’m understanding the OP to mean a frictionless surface material attached to some other material. But there’s the rub. (Sorry - it just slipped out.) I don’t believe you could find any way to bond Nonfrictionlon to anything else.
So let’s presume we’re working with solid Nonfrictionlon. What you do is mold threaded screwholes into the object when you cast it. Torque down the screws tight enough and tension/compression should hold 'em in place.
Just don’t bump into the thing, or it’ll slide clear to the end of the factory.
It might work, but the table is going to look like it was built by Dr. Frankenstein if we have bolts sticking out everywhere.