irresistible force meets an immovable object

2006-07-12

"What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?"

I have not heard the question in decades now.  I wonder why? Prior to that we used to hear the question often.  Last week the answer came to me when I was thinking about the behavior of two people when neither is willing to change their position.  I drew on physics for the answer.

An immovable object must have huge mass to prevent it from moving, and an irresistible force is one that has an unlimited - infinite - source of energy behind it.

• Essentially, for an object to be (relatively) immovable, it must have sufficient mass to resist being accelerated by an increasing force.
• For a force to be irresistible, it must be capable of accelerating successively larger masses, that is it must embody increasing mass itself.

Let's look at an analogy.

The military wants to have armor to resist armor piercing shells.  They also want to have shells that will pierce armor,  What to they do?
They find a contractor that will research and build state of the art armor that can't be pierced by any known shells. After a while the contract calls the military supplier, and says, "We've done it!  Pay up!
So the military pays them. Now they advertise and find a contract that manufactures armor piercing shells. They take the new armor to the contractor, and say, "This armor resists all the shells we have. We need a new shell that will pierce this armor."  Contractors bid,  a contract is let, and the winner goes to work.   After a while the contract calls the military supplier, and says, "We've done it!  Pay up!
Now the military goes back to the armor manufactures with the new shell, and starts the process all over again. The armor gets heaver, and the shells get bigger and more powerful.

The armor becomes the object that is desired to be unbreakable, that is, an immovable object.  The shell becomes the force that is desired to be unstoppable, that is, an irresistible force.The "immovable object" therefore must exhibit increasing mass while the applied force is increasing.  The "irresistible force" therefore must be instantiated in a (potentially) moving increasing mass.

Somewhat obviously, the "immovable object" must have infinite mass, and conversely the irresistible force must itself have infinite force - that is energy.

Since we can't handle infinite mass, we can see what happens to increasing mass - and see where that takes us as we approach the infinite 

Energy is mass, so when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, the two masses come together.

When two huge or unlimited mass-energy systems come together, the combined mass is increased in density, because both the immovable object and the irresistible force command ever increasing mass. The bigger the mass is, the stronger the gravity it generates.  And the stronger the gravity gets, the more the combined mass gets compressed.  As these two "meet", the mass concentration increases with the applied force until the mass density is so high that a black hole is created.  As the energy source keeps entering the black hole, it become super-massive, and it consumes the entire energy supply of both.  All matter and energy is collapsed into a singularity in the black hole - "destroyed" as far as any observer is concerned.

 This continues to grow as long as the "irresistible" force is applied to the "immovable" object, eventually consuming the entire universe (multiverse) of available energy into one singularity.  Consequently, when an irresistible force meets an immovable object, everything is destroyed. 

So, when an irresistible force meets and immovable object, a black hole is created and everything is destroyed - concentrated in a single point, with no reference point to measure position or motion.

If you want to apply this in interpersonal relationships, the answer is simple.  The result is a lose-lose situation.