I noticed some annoying bait-and-switch in the article https://
http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...object-vacuum-
friction/.

The first paragraph talks about balls of silicon dioxide that rotate
300 billion times per second, which would be 1.8 trillion RPM.
Imagine my dismay at finding out, a couple of paragraphs later,
that the author had mixed up RPS and RPM; the particles actually
are spinning at only 5 GHz (5 billion RPS), or 300 billion RPM.

--
jiw