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/

explainxkcd for #3084

  • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    34·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • WolfLink@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        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.

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        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.