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Syrus
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Homework Statement
In Goldstein's text, he discusses conservative fields and then states that "friction or dissipative forces are never conservative since F dot ds is always positive."
From what I recall, most frictional interactions occur in directions opposite the displacement, and would, hence, result in negative values of the dot product. Shouldn't, then, the text read isntead: friction or dissipative forces are never conservative since F dot ds is always non-zero?
I have checked a few other classical mechanics texts and they all seem to have statements along the same lines- so I feel there is a detail I am missing here.