Difficult Questions

After watching the 2005 British romantic comedy Imagine Me and You [IMB] last night, a couple of difficult or unanswerable questions posed by child actress Boo Jackson, in the role "H", the bride's precocious sister Henrietta (who says the single-letter nickname originated when her mother cried "Jesus H. Christ!" upon learning we was pregnant) remained in my mind.

The first unanswerable question, "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" is disposed of in the movie by the character Luce who explains that it's really a trick question. Wikipedia describes the Irresistible Force Paradox as "a form of the omnipotence paradox," discussed in the context of the omnipotence of the God of Abrahamic religions, ("Can God create a stone so heavy it cannot be lifted?"). After mentioning some theoretical possibilities involving the Laws of Relativity, a second explanation offered is essentially the one provided by Luce in the film: "...that the event in question is a contradiction, avoids any paradox. If there exists an irresistible force, there is no immovable object, and vice-versa."

The second question was one which I didn't initially recognize as so difficult until I started searching. The question of why the letters of the Roman alphabet fall in the order they do seems like something that I remember hearing explained by a professor of languages a few decades ago while I was an undergraduate, but I can't quite recall what he said. A lengthy on-line dialog on the question is on the website ask.metafilter.com. It reminded me of a table (click the thumbnail at right) in my old unabridged Funk & Wagnall's Dictionary from which I first memorized the names of the Greek alphabet as a teenager.

The above are not exactly weighty questions, but their difficulty is a reflection of human nature.

Here are my suggestions for a sequel to the movie.