Careless walks cost lives, but measuring friction is tricky (Image: PM Images/Getty)

WINTER: ’tis the season of reduced friction. Depending on where you are, you might be anticipating the first icy days of the year’s coldest season, or already be well attuned to its attendant dangers. Ice plus incaution, we all know, equals slips, slides, broken bones and mangled cars and bicycles.

Not your problem, you might think, if you are basking on Bondi beach or sunning yourself in your Florida bolt-hole. You would be wrong. Even in Australia, where ice tends to be confined to the beer cooler, slips on low-friction surfaces such as tiled bathroom floors or oil-slicked filling station forecourts result in a dozen deaths, tens of thousands of injuries and an estimated AU$ 1 billion in lost productivity each year. That’s a picture comparable to those in the US and the UK. “Slip resistance is a global problem,” says Richard Bowman, a slip consultant at Intertile Research in Melbourne.

That’s why, in safety laboratories around the world, fearless researchers are having our accidents for us, slipping and sliding their way, they hope, towards a better understanding of the perils of reduced friction. They do not have it easy. Friction might be everywhere – except where it is suddenly absent – but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to get to grips with.

Even supercomputers capable of calculating what goes on inside stars or modelling the most complex characteristics of the atomic world slip up on friction’s intricacies. “Friction is not a material property, it’s a system response,” explains Roland Larsson of Luleå University of Technology …