Saturday, February 16, 2008

Amazing Paradoxes

Science sure have progressed a lot but there is a downside too. These are few of the paradoxes in science i came across while browsing the net. Wow, just think of the amazing possibilities its creating.

Grandfather paradox: Traveller going back in time and killing his own grandfather before his parent is conceived, thereby precluding his own travel to the past by canceling his own existence.

Predestination paradox: When a time traveller is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" him or her to travel back in time. Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time travelling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveller attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history as we know it, not changing it.

An ontological paradox, or ontolodox, is a paradox of time travel that questions the existence and creation of information and objects that travel in time.
eg. A professor travels forward in time, and reads in a physics journal about a new equation that was recently derived. He travels back to his own time, and relates it to one of his students who writes it up, and the article is published in the same journal which the professor reads in the future.

A floating cork paradox is a paradox to show that it is impossible to intentionally prevent an event from occuring using time travel.

Newcomb's Paradox, also referred to as Newcomb's Problem, is a thought experiment involving a game between two players, one of whom purports to be able to predict the future.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true.

Then comes the most famous - The chicken or the egg parodox. lol

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