Physicists Crack the Question of Why Basketball Shoes Squeak

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IIf you’ve ever watched a basketball game, you know the white noise of staccato squeaks coming from players’ shoes as they maneuver around the court. Now, new research published in Nature highlights this phenomenon.

“This project started with a simple question: why do basketball shoes squeak? Adel Djelloul, an applied physicist at Harvard University, said in a statement.

To answer this question, Djelloul and his colleagues used high-speed imaging to record the movement of sneakers and blocks of silicone rubbed against glass. “We combined total internal reflection imaging with cameras capturing up to 1 million frames per second to visualize the evolution of contact between rubber and glass,” explained Djelloul. “To drive sliding, we adapted a setup conceptually similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century friction experiments.”

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High-speed cameras revealed that the sneaker’s tread intermittently slipped and stuck to the surface at supersonic speeds, causing a sound wave. The ridges on the sneakers’ tread, they discovered, were key to producing squeaks. While the smooth silicone produced a broadband noise similar to what you might hear from a faulty white noise machine, the ridged rubber acted like a waveguide, producing clear sound.

They also found that the pitch of the tone produced was a function of the thickness of the rubber blocks used, with thinner blocks producing higher pitches. In fact, this relationship was so precise that the team was able to create custom blocks to play “The Imperial March” from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

Interestingly, this new research could help explain some of the dynamics at play during earthquakes, when two tectonic plates slide quickly against each other.

“These results connect two traditionally disconnected fields: soft material tribology and earthquake dynamics,” said study co-author Shmuel Rubinstein of the Hebrew University. “Gentle friction is generally considered slow, but we show that the squeak of a sneaker can propagate as fast, or faster, than the rupture of a geological fault, and that their physics is surprisingly similar.”

Some scientific discoveries arise from a pressing need; others, like this one, arise from the simple desire to pique curiosity.

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Main image: YummyBuum / Shutterstock

• Jake Currie

  Published on February 27, 2026

  Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.