Dr. Nosonovsky has joint the Program Committee of

Workshop on Logics for Unconventional Computing

Below are some thoughts om the subject. Interestingly, friction and other surface phenomena including adhesion, capillarity, and the superhydrophobicity have logical and information aspects. Friction involves various paradoxes, such as the Painlevé paradoxes of non-existence and non-uniqueness of solutions in mechanical systems of rigid bodies with dry friction. When elastic deformation is introduced, the paradoxical solutions correspond to frictional instabilities. The dynamic evolution of a frictional interface towards a limit cycle can be viewed as a process of erasing the information about the interface due to the instabilities. Furthermore, while friction force is universal, it is not a fundamental force of nature, and it can be considered as an epiphenomenon of various synergetic mechanisms. This further relates friction to other surface effects including the capillarity, with its binary logic of wetting states and a possibility of droplet computation for lab-on-a-chip microfluidic reactors, as it was shown by Prakash and Gershenfeld. While there is no such thing as the “frictional logic” or “capillary logic,” there is a number of important logical and informational implications of friction and wetting.