Ever feel the need to truly find out what the universe holds for you? Well, answers to these questions will definitely get you closer.
If you are bored and feel the need to answer all our existential questions, here’s a heavy hobby to kill your time. These are the few paradoxes that have baffled our brains limited to 4 dimensions, and they promise to intrigue you.
NOTE: The reasons they are paradoxes, is because they are unsolved. I cannot promise you answers, but I promise to ask the right questions.
The Grandfather Paradox
This is probably the most widely known paradox – thanks to pop culture. The grandfather paradox states that if you are capable of time travel; and u travel back into time to kill your grandfather never allowing your dad to be born and hence preventing your own birth; how exactly will you have killed your grandfather?
Predestination Paradox
Yet another time travel paradox; it’s a condition that might create a situation to explain the grandfather paradox. It strips down to the fact that if you travel back in time to avoid something, and your attempts to stop the event causes the event and then leads you to travel back in time.
How it breaks the grandfather paradox is that it counts the butterfly effect in action. Your entry in a different time in the same place might be the reason for your birth and the death of your grandfather; causing exactly what you were set to avoid.
Twins Paradox
The Twins paradox is rooted in the fact that time slows down as you approach the speed of light. So, if a friend of yours is timing your rocket speed from Earth to a certain point in space and then back; which one of you aged more? Because according to your friend, the earth moved away, and he should be younger; while you perceived earth to be still; so which one of you had a faster perception of time?
The Ship of Theseus
This is another paradox you might be familiar with. The premise of this paradox is simple: if you have a ship; and over time you replace every part of that ship to a new one; is that the same ship? To put things in perspective; if you saved all the old parts and built a new ship out of it; which one is the original ship?
Bootstrap Paradox
The third and last paradox on this list is this baffling one. The bootstrap paradox can be explained best by the plot of Terminator: Where Kyle Reese, a boy younger than John Connor is sent back in time to protect his mother from an evil terminator, he becomes John’s father. So he’s a person of the future who becomes a key part of the past for the future to ever happen. So, the past is dependent on a future event to have occurred already.
Sorites Paradox
The Sorites paradox asks you to consider a heap of sand. Now, if you remove one grain from this heap; there remains a grain, but if you keep doing this till only one grain is remaining, would it still be a heap of sand? At what point do you start calling it not a heap of sand; or at what point do you start calling a collective of grains of sand as a heap?
Grelling-Nelson Paradox
This one requires a little brushing on vocabulary. Here are the two key words you need to know:
Autological words
Autological words are the ones that describe themselves. e.g. – noun, carbohydrates
Heterological words
These are the words that don’t describe themselves. e.g. – red, square
Got it? Good.
Now, the trouble begins when you ask the question – “Is the word heterological heterological?”
If the answer is no, then heterological must be an autological word. But if it is autological and describes itself, the heterological is definitely heterological.
If the answer is yes, then heterological, technically, is not heterological and hence is autological.
Tele-transportation Paradox
This paradox is based on the assumption that teleportation is possible, and how it works is – it kills the person who went in by disintegrating them and then reintegrates them in a new place. This means that the atoms that comprised you in point A don’t comprise you in point B. So, is the person who went in same as the one who came out just because they have the same emotion, memory and aptitude?
I hope you have fun thinking about these headbangers, and who knows, maybe you’ll solve one of them. Maybe it’ll start your search for the unknown.
