General question regarding the intuition of friction.

Question

anonymous · Answer

So my question is how would you find the force required to overcome static friction. For example, if you were given an object with a mass of m and a static friction of k, how would you solve the amount of force required to overcome k?

doc.brown · Answer

If you are on the surface of Earth, the mass of the Earth accelerates your mass towards it, just as the Earth is accelerated towards your mass (it just doesn't move as far).
The force of the acceleration on the mass can be expressed neatly as $F=ma$.
Since your mass $m$ is resting on a surface, the acceleration $a$ is canceled out by the same amount of force $F$ coming from the surface.
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