Why moistening your fingers helps increase their traction with respect to opening thin plastic bags or flipping through paper, but moisture on a road decreases the traction of your car tires?
In: 5
Water has something called surface tension. Basically water molecules are slightly attracted to other water molecules, like a super weak magnet.
When you lick your fingers, you’re using that weak attractive force to make light weight objects like paper stick to you.
That force isn’t nearly strong enough to stop a moving car and it doesn’t scale up with more water. So on a larger scale, water is just a fluid substance that gets between the car and the road, reducing friction.
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