A friend and I have been having an ongoing debate for years. We were at a pub on a wharf, watching shipping container ships and cruise ships come into dock, and he posed the question. With no wind, no waves, perfect conditions, could he move the ship at all?
In: Planetary Science
Yes, with some difficulty.
In ideal conditions, the only thing you’d have to overcome would be the inertia of the container, which can only multiplicatively reduce the acceleration you apply, not reduce it to zero.
Assuming you were somehow immune to being moved in turn by the equal and opposite reaction to what you’re exerting (perhaps you are rooted by footstraps or a mechanism similar to what locks boots into skis and snowboards), you would gradually be able to move it. The more massive the container, the slower the process would be.
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