Push Matchbox 20

[Margaretha Palone]

Im a '90s kid. I mean, I was actually a proper child in the '90s. I turned seven in the first year of the 21st century. When most people say they are '90s kids, they really mean they were born in the '80s and had their formative coming of age years in the '90s. Consequently, my relationship to the pop culture of the decade of my birth is rather odd, as those formative years for me were really the early 2000s. Micro-generations make a big difference.

Music, in particular, is a weak spot for me. I missed out on grunge, neo-soul, gangsta rap, and so much more. My popular music awareness started forming around the time of "Millennium" by the Backstreet Boys in 1999. So, I have no nostalgia for this era of music or, quite frankly, know much of it. When I decided to go back and listen to music before my time, I went to the '60s and '70s, not the '90s.

My lack of connection to the music of this era prevented me from fully connecting with two music-focused sequences in "Barbie." The first involved the Indigo Girls' "Closer To Fine," covered by Brandi and Catherine Carlile, which plays every time Barbie drives her car. I'd never heard this song before. The second is a significant comic showcase for Ryan Gosling and his fellow Kens where they perform a cover of Matchbox Twenty's "Push," incorrectly believing they are wooing the Barbies. I'd only heard the song in passing, so while everyone around me was guffawing at the song choice, I was only lightly chuckling at the scene's intention.

One of those '80s-born people who had their formative years in the 1990s was "Barbie" co-writer and director Greta Gerwig. She was born in 1983, making her 13 years old when Matchbox Twenty dropped "Push" in 1996. That 12-16 zone for someone is crucial: every movie, every TV show, and every song that people obsess over during those years tend to imprint on them forever. For Gerwig, "Push" was a big deal at that age. She tells USA Today, "Growing up, I loved that song ... I was like, 'This is my rock 'n' roll.'"

When you're that young, though, you don't always grasp what a song means when you listen to it. You work purely off the vibes because maybe the concepts are just a bit more mature than your brain can fully grapple with. (This can also be a problem for adults. How many people out there still think Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" is a patriotic anthem? Too many.) Gerwig explains that it wasn't until she went to college when she "actually thought, 'What is that song about?' Just thinking about 13-year-old me singing along and really meaning it, I was like, 'That is so interesting.'"

"Push" was the second single off of Matchbox Twenty's debut album "Yourself or Someone Like You," which went an astoundingly impressive 12x platinum in the US. It was also met with much controversy, as many took it to be a song about glorifying domestic violence and emotional abuse. I mean, the chorus has Rob Thomas triumphantly singing, "I wanna push you around/Well I will, well I will." However, Thomas claims this was never his intention. Speaking with USA Today, he recalls:

"What's funny is, I wrote that song about someone I had been with who I felt was manipulating me and taking advantage of me. The '90s was a time of manufactured angst, and nobody wanted to be a victim in a song. So in a weird twist of different times, there's something very problematic about 'Push,' if it wasn't for the innocence of how it was written."

With that lyrical content, it makes perfect sense why Ryan Gosling's Ken, who's been completely radicalized by the idea of the patriarchy (or, at least, the aesthetics of the patriarchy) sings this song to a woman he claims to love, perfectly spotlighting just how clueless he is. Thomas was up for providing the soundtrack to that ignorance, saying:

"When I got the call for 'Barbie,' they told me, 'Ken's by the fireside, he's playing the song and it's his favorite band.' So I did this thinking I'd be the butt of the joke, and I was fine with that. I'm pretty thick-skinned."

Because Gosling plays it so well, "Push" strangely endears you even more to Ken. Thomas was told as much by Atlantic Records exec Julie Greenwald ("She had just seen the movie and was like, 'You come out of it loving Ken and loving "Push."' And I was like, 'Aww. Alright, really good!'") Now that I'm more familiar with the song, I wouldn't be surprised if I join in on the guffaws on my second viewing.

When I push a table using my finger, the table applies the same force onto my finger like my finger does on the table just with an opposing direction, nothing happens except that I feel the opposing force.

But why can I push a box on a table by applying force ($F=ma$) on one side, obviously outbalancing the force the box has on my finger and at the same time outbalancing the friction the box has on the table?

I obviously have the greater mass and acceleration as for example the matchbox on the table and thusly I can move it, but shouldn't the third law prevent that from even happening? Shouldn't the matchbox just accommodate to said force and applying the same force to me in opposing direction?

Here's a picture of some of the forces in this scenario.$^\dagger$ The ones that are the same colour as each other are pairs of equal magnitude, opposite direction forces from Newton's third law. (W and R are of equal magnitude in opposite directions, but they're acting on the same object - that's Newton's first law in action.)

The point of the diagram is to make clear that the third law makes matched pairs of forces that act on different objects. Equilibrium from Newton's first or second law is about the resultant force at a single object.

$\dagger$ (Sorry that the finger doesn't actually touch the matchbox in the diagram. If it had, I wouldn't have had space for the important safety notice on the matches. I wouldn't want any children to be harmed because of a misplaced force arrow. Come to think of it, the dagger on this footnote looks a bit sharp.)

sitting in the chair, I folded my legs up so that they are not in touch with ground. Now I pushed the wall with my hands. Of course, wall didn't move but my chair and I moved backward! why? because wall pushed me back and wheels could overcome the friction.

Good! This question implies that you're thinking hard and questioning the laws. It turns out that you are misunderstanding Newton's 2nd Law though. Motion of a body is due to an external force. F1 (force of finger on box) acts on your box, but not F2 (force of box on finger). An object can never act on itself.

If I could only change one thing about physics education, it would be the phrasing of Newton's 3rd law. According to my copy of Magnificent Principia (by Colin Pask, Prometheus Books, 2013) the "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction..." phrasing is Newton's. And it's been causing confusion ever since.

Again, you can think of this as two different forces. But I think the equation really hints at a single attractive force (different charge signs) or a single repulsive force (identical charge signs) between two charges.

Newton's third law is traditionally taught as pairs of forces. I think it makes more sense to present it is as a single force that must always operate between pairs of bodies, as implied by Coulomb's law and the Universal Gravitation equation.

This is harder to see with contact forces. Part of the problem is that human muscles must constantly expend energy at a molecular level in order to stay contracted. So it's easy to confuse force exertion with expenditure of energy. And humans have cognition and agency. So to say, "The person pushes on the matchbox and the matchbox pushes on the person" feels wrong because the person is expending energy; the matchbox is not. The person has agency and initiates the push; the matchbox is inanimate.

To get a better feel for Newton's third law, consider yourself in a deep swimming pool where your feet are off the bottom. You're next to the wall. Now push on the wall. What happens? You push yourself away from the wall. The traditional explanation is that you push on the wall, and "the wall pushes back on you." And while that is technically true, it doesn't make intuitive sense because you know darn well that you're the one doing the pushing.

What's really happening is that you create a repulsive force between the wall and yourself. The wall is fixed to the earth and the earth is mighty big and hard to move. So the repulsive force manifests itself in you pushing yourself away from the wall.

When you "push the matchbox," you're really setting up a repulsive force between your finger and the matchbox. (At a molecular level, this is just the Coulomb repulsion, of course.) But you're much more massive than the matchbox. Your weight and the friction between your shoes and the floor essentially fix you to the floor and make you immovable. So the repulsive force manifests itself as the matchbox moving.

So many physics problems are expressed as "A attracts B" or "A repels B." That wording is misleading at best. What really happens is that "A and B attract each other" or "A and B repel each other." Always. That is Newton's 3rd law.

Finally, when dealing with forces where one mass (or one charge) is fixed in some way, or so much larger than the other (such as an apple falling towards the earth), it's very common to ignore that fact that the masses are attracting each other, and to phrase the interaction as if it were just the earth attracting the apple and nothing more. That is an oversimplification. But it's justified by the fact that the attractive force between the two masses is overwhelmingly manifested in the motion of the apple.

"The changes made by these actions are equal . . . if the bodies arenot hindered by any other impediments . . . the changes of velocities made towards common parts are reciprocally proportional to the bodies [the masses]."

While considering 3rd law, forces act on different bodies , and not on same bodies. So the body which is hit is under the influence of applied external force only. The force which the hit body applies back to the hitting object is acting on the hitting object, so no point of cancelling of forces as they are acting on different objects.

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