My final team project for my first-year, third-quarter college Physics class was to investigate the behavior of static frictional forces between two objects. Really though, we just wanted to do something with lasers.
What that means is that we wanted to look at, for instance, a block of wood on a table, when the block is given a force on its side but isn't actually budged. It turns out that the block does move in relation to the table, and when the force is released everything settles back into place, like a spring. That displacement is very small, barely if at all visible to the unaided eye. In order to measure such a minute displacement, a high precision measuring device was needed - something like an interferometer. Hence, we got our lasers.
The following two links describe most of the set-up for the device we made for class.