If they're not moving it's called static friction — the force on the table pushing up, the weight on the book pushing down — opposite forces. The book doesn't move until something changes.

Put another way, exceptionally low friction at the atomic scale was not a prerequisite for the substantial reduction in macroscopic friction. Last year Martin Muser of Johannes Gutenberg Universitat ...

Scientists from the Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics at the University of Lodz have published an article on friction in the journal Small. Their research on "bismuth islands" moving on ...