Title text:
Unstoppable force-carrying particles can’t interact with immovable matter by definition.
Transcript:
[An arrow pointing to the right and a trapezoid are labeled as ‘Unstoppable Force’ and ‘Immovable Object’ respectively.]
[The arrow is shown as entering the trapezoid from the left and the part of it in said trapezoid is coloured gray.]
[The arrow is shown as leaving the trapezoid to the right and is coloured black.]
[Caption below the panel:] I don’t see why people find this scenario to be tricky.
Source: https://xkcd.com/3084/
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The expression as I heard included “an irresistible force.”
That’s on the nsfw version of xkcd
Oglaf?
xkcd after dark, or xkcdad. But not pronounced xkc-dad.
Yeah, irresistible force is the version I know. Now I’m wondering if there are even more versions. Are they regional deviations?
Well I’m from Utica and I’ve never heard the term “irresistible force”
Not in Utica, no. It’s an Albany expression.
While not what you’re asking for, but fun fact, in Asia, this sort of paradox is represented by the story of the all-piercing spear and the unpierceable shield in Chinese philosophy. So in Chinese and Japanese, the word for ‘paradox’ or ‘contradiction’ literally means ‘spear-shield’ (矛盾).
Facepalm Man i’m dumb, this is a great answer to that thought experiment.
Force is not a thing that moves. Force is what is applied to an object. In this “answer” whatever is shown and depicted as force is not force.
Then reverse the assumptions. Maybe it’s the immovable object that can’t be interacted with. Apply all the force you want and meet nothibg
If you applied the unstoppable force and the object of application did not move - then this force was not unstoppable
Eh, it’s just redefining the assumed meaning. “Intangible” does mean “unstoppable” in a way, but that’s not really what’s intended.
“What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” that image doesn’t show a force meeting an object
They met, they just didn’t interact. Kinda like me at a work party.
“where’s the food and booze?”
That just moves the problem, what happens if I put a piece of paper between them? Unless they don’t interact with anything they still face the same problem.
There is no force without interaction, just linear momentum.
Maybe the universe will crash due to division by zero, floating-point error, integer overflow and segmentation fault, all of them occurring simultaneously. The objects will experience infinite velocity and infinite forces, there will be rounding errors, the system will run out of RAM and storage space. The universal CPU will max out all threads, and run out of cooling capacity. The hardware catches fire, the entire universe immediately collapses into a singularity, resulting in a new big bang as the system reboots. Oh, and the log files are corrupted, so good luck troubleshooting that one.
A popup will appear asking you to buy the “Extended Physics” DLC
First billion years free. After that it’s 17.99 per millennia.
What currency?
I doubt the universe accepts Euro or whatever.
It’s just 17.99. Take it or leave it.
That’s actually how black holes are made
Division by zero is just zero.
Just think about it. You have 4 slices of pie and 0 people to eat any.
How much pie did each of those no people eat. Clearly the answer is just 0.
Education took us for absolute fools.
This one is a bit counterintuitive. My maths teacher explained it like this. Take a look at this graph. If you approach zero from the positive side, it looks like the line goes to infinity. If you approach zero from the negative side, it appears to go to negative infinity instead.
Is it both, is it zero, is it all the values? The canonical answer is “undefined”. The value of y at x=0 doesn’t have a meaningful answer.
It’s just as true a statement to say each of those 0 people at a billion slices of pie.
However, with these types of word problems, there’s usually the implication that the pie is now gone. There’s kind of a problem figuring out where the pie went when nobody ate any pie.
i think I’ve made that game engine before.
This is soo politically charged that can’t be seen as political anymore.
Pretty sure none of these exist so idk why it bothered any1 in the first place.
There are some pretty close physical analogs that are fun to think about. You cant move a black hole by exerting physical force on it in the normal way so practically infinite gravity wells are like a immovable “object”, though if you’re sufficently nerdy enough you can cook some fun ways to harness its gravitational rotation into a kind of engine, or throw another black hole at it to create a big explosion and some gravitational waves which are like a kind of unstoppable force moving at the speed of light.
Relevant username
You can attract a black hole using gravity tho
if people only bothered to think about things that exist (especially things that they think exist) we would probably go the way of the dodo. funnily enough that would prevent the dodos from going that way but whatever.
I highly recommend watching the Vsauce video on supertasks—it’s a great video as expected from Vsauce but also ends on a great note about people and their tendency to think about things like this.
You clearly haven’t met my mother.
Is the an unstoppable force or an immovable object or a little bit of both?
Both.
Noooooo! You’re violating my binary thinking! Either A or B has to win!
So neutrinos?
🤯
so if god creates rock so heavy that it can’t lift it, its hand just passes through the rock? makes sense.
No that doesn’t make sense. The thing you’re alluring at is a classical thought experiment showing contradiction in allmightiness.
P1: God is Almighty, meaning he can do anything
Therefore he must be able to create a stone he can’t lift. But then there is something he can’t do: Either he can not lift the super stone, or he can not create a super stone that he can’t lift.
lol I am not alluring to anything I am just giving a xkcd twist to this well known paradox
… it’s ‘alluding’, y’all
I don’t know, heavy things attract other things, so maybe it is alluring ;)
