By Devin Powell
It’s no wonder earthquakes are so difficult to predict. Even simple laboratory simulations of the friction breakdowns that send tectonic plates lurching into motion are maddeningly difficult to explain.
By playing with plastic blocks that stick and slip much like rock, physicists are challenging centuries-old ideas about the nature of friction itself. Seemingly unimportant differences at small scales can have big consequences, an Israeli team reports in an upcoming Physical Review Letters.
“If you want to know how hard you have to push a specific object [to overcome friction], and you want to know to high precision, right now we don’t know what the answer is,” says Jay Fineberg, a physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.