I don't care what people say, I still love the sport!

In honor of the Olympics I am going to talk about one of the major natural phenomena that almost all of the winter athletes have to take into account: friction.

Friction is a force resisting motion of solids, liquid layers and elements in contact. Basically, friction is the force opposite of motion. When you think of friction, you are probably thinking about kinetic friction. This is the friction created by two objects when moving relative to each other. A specific type of kinetic friction is fluid friction. This is when a solid object moves over/through a liquid of gas. Friction is created because of charge particles.

Flashback: Every object is comprised of little tiny itsy bitsy molecules that have charges.
Molecules have a nucleus with a positive charge (protons are positive and neutrons are charge neutral) and the nucleus is surrounded by negatively charged electrons. Most molecules end up have an overall net charge of zero, but charges can change.

When two objects move past one another, their charged particles are passing one another. You should know that two opposite charges do not like one another. When charged particles are forced past other charged particles, resistance (friction) and heat (thermal energy) is created. Need a visual? Rub your hands together. They don’t just slid past one another easily (friction) and they will start to warm up (thermal energy).

That was a nice little intro into friction, but trust me, after taking physics you will learn there is a LOT more to friction (actually, I feel like I say that in almost every post – I guess just know I am giving you very basic foundations of scientific knowledge in these posts). Now I want to apply it to one of my favorite winter sports: curling.

In curling, a person pushes their stone down the ice in hopes of knocking the opponents stones out of the way and landing closest to the center of the target - very simple concept, but lots of physics to think about.

After the stone is released, friction between the stone and the ice will cause the stone to gradually slow until it stops. To reduce this friction, the ice of curling matches is not smooth. It is sprayed with water to create a surface with lots of tiny ice bumps. This reduces the amount of ice surface area the curling stone will come in contact with and thereby reduces the amount of friction the stone will encounter. Sweeping the path in front of the stone creates friction and the thermal energy (heat) actually smoothes and softens the ice a little (about 1.5 degrees) to help guide the curling stone. Until very recently people thought the ice being swept in front of the stone actually melted – thermal imaging cameras destroyed that theory a few months ago. The sweeping actually only softens the ice.


Researchers were hired by the Canadian government to study the physics of curling (they released the data above) and I would love to tell you more of the results they found, but the Canadian government has them under confidentiality contracts until June 2010. Canada really wants gold this year!

Here is a link to a video with footage of the thermal imaging cameras: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/02/05/f-tech-physics-curling.html?ref=rss