I've never thought of that statement as being so hard to understand, for lack of a better word. If you rub any two pieces of identical material by each other they will eventually wear away, relative to the amount of contact time in a specific location and force. so if you rub a piece of iron blade that has a cross sectional width of say 1/4" across a 12" plate of iron of course the blade with eventually get sharper. On a molecular level you are removing molecules and because the blades has a substantially smaller surface area it will lose an equivalent amount of molecules... In other words it will wear down quicker. And after all what is sharpening, it's when you wear down the edge of a tool so that it produces a desired edge.
If you had the time you could sharpen a blade using only paper, simply because even though the steel is much harder and resilient it will still lose molecules as it is rubbed against the paper. It would take a great deal of time but the end result would be an incredibly sharp edge because the loss of molecules would be so slow and gentle it could quite conceivably produce an edge that was only a couple molecules across, considering the ultimate edge is 1 molecule in width.
Last edited by John Keeton; 07-09-2014 at 7:25 PM.
Sent from the bathtub on my Samsung Galaxy(C)S5 with waterproof Lifeproof Case(C), and spell check turned off!