Limited Evidence is Not No Evidence: A Rebuttal to Fransen, 2024

Friction is an essential force that influences the motion of objects in daily life. Depending on the situation, it can be either beneficial or problematic. Consider a bus with a mass of three megagrams and its center of mass at a specific point, moving along a banked road at a constant speed. The coefficient of static friction between the tires and the road is 0.5. Find the maximum angle of the banked road at which the bus would not slip or tip.
Initially, a visual representation of the...

When a body is in motion, it encounters resistance because the body interacts with its surroundings. This resistance is known as friction, a common yet complex force whose behavior is still not completely understood. Friction opposes relative motion between systems in contact, but also allows us to move. Friction arises in part due to the roughness of surfaces in contact. For one object to move along a surface, it must rise to where the peaks of the surface can skip along the bottom of the...

Information is everywhere and its presentation—such as how and when items are presented—can impact our perceptions and decisions surrounding the info. This broad concept umbrellas framing effects—influences that occur due to the way information is framed in its appearance, whether it’s purely the order or the specific wording of a message. Let’s take a look at numerous ways in which two versions of something can objectively say the same thing, yet we respond in...

Screws are characterized by a helical ridge known as a thread wrapped around a cylindrical shaft. They are commonly used as fasteners to hold objects together or to transmit power and motion in machines. One type of screw that is particularly useful for transmitting power is the square-threaded screw.
A jack with a square-threaded screw is a mechanical device used to lift heavy loads by applying a force at its handle. When the force is applied, the screw turns, raising the load. The screw can...

Flat belts are commonly used in various industrial applications for transmitting power from one pulley to another. When a flat belt is wrapped around a set of pulleys, it experiences different tensions at the driving pulley ends due to the friction between the belt and pulley surface. When the pulley moves in a counterclockwise direction, the tension T2 on the opposite side of the pulley where the belt is moving away from is higher than the tension T1 on the side where the belt is moving...

According to the law of conservation of energy, any transition between kinetic and potential energy conserves the total energy of the system. Hence, the work done by a conservative force is completely reversible. It is path independent, which means that we can start and stop at any two points in the transition, and the total energy of the system (kinetic plus potential energy at these points) will remain conserved. This is characteristic of a conservative force. Some important examples of...