system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If friction is based on electrostatic force, then shouldn’t it be conservative (electrostatic force is conservative)? What property of it makes it non-conservative?
gpt
It's an artefact of the model. The actual system is made of atoms, and if we kept track of every single atom, we would find that energy is conserved. However, much of this energy is going to get locked up as heat - random thermal motions which we can statistically average out and don't impact the bulk motion of the macroscopic objects.