Carrion Luggage

Wall-Crawler

The random numbers gave me this one today, from Popular Science earlier this month.

    Vertically rolling ball ‘challenges our basic understanding of physics’  
The lab-built orb can roll down a 90-degree surface.

Yeah... that bit in the headline is apparently an actual quote from the scientists involved. But, as we'll see, the article didn't convince me that this is the kind of thing to say that about.

Take recent observations made by a team at the University of Waterloo, for example. Under a very specific set of conditions, these experts achieved something previously thought impossible under gravity’s constraints: they documented a sphere not falling or sliding, but rolling down a vertical surface.

I'm not saying it's not cool, mind you.

“We double-checked everything because it seemed to defy common sense. There was excitement in the lab when we confirmed it wasn’t a fluke and that this was real vertical rolling.”

But that's what science is for, in part: to "defy common sense."

The surreal display of physics relied on a pea-sized soft gel sphere’s finely tuned elasticity and its relationship to a vertical surface—in this case, a glass microscope slide. If researchers crafted a polymer orb that was too soft, then the sphere inevitably either stuck to the slide or slid down it. If the object was made too rigid, then gravity caused it to simply fall straight down.

It seems to me, based on that paragraph, that far from being an accident that would require rewriting physics from the ground up, they were working on this specific setup, and have a pretty good idea of what causes the behavior.

As they explain in their study recently published in the journal Soft Matter, these attributes produce a “dynamically changing contact diameter and a unique contact asymmetry.”

That sounds awfully close to bizspeak jargon. But it's science jargon. No, I don't fully understand it, either.

Harnessing the physics of vertical rolling could one day be applied across soft robotics to create new machines capable of inspecting pipe interiors, exploring difficult-to-reach cave systems, and future devices destined for the moon or Mars.

I guess everyone wants to know what the practical use for something is. There doesn't have to be one. If you're going to insist on listing possible practical uses, though, it might be good to be more details on exactly how it'll be useful. For example, we already have robots for inspecting pipe interiors; what would this do differently?

That's about it, really. My issues with the reporting aside, it's a pretty cool concept, and that was reason enough for me to share it.