If I tell you my previous statement was a lie and I'm telling the truth about it then I'm telling the truth in this statement and was lying in the previous also the "who wrote Beethoven" bit in doctor who, he could of wrote it in the first place but took it too him too early and then it seems as if it wrote itself the paradox. I wonder if everything started because of a paradox the opposite of nothing is everything infinitely no start point .. no end
The Grandfather Paradox is pretty easy to solve, actually. It's just that the answer is too boring for Hollywood. The reason the killer exists is because their birth was not prevented. So either the person they killed was not actually their grandfather, or their grandfather was not killed. What makes up the present already takes the past into account, so whatever happened in the past is always what had happened and there is no "changing" the present by altering the past.
no matter the day, I have a dose of Simon and his deep dive into al these amazing topics. I'm sure my family is tired of my shite. stay safe and awesome evryone, Simon, Writers, viewers! If you got a minute, checkout my links in my bio! xoxo
The Bootstrap Paradox reminds me of something I heard about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The BBC always covered it on the radio, so there'd be a commentator telling the listeners which team was ahead at every stage. However, at one point, the Thames curved in such a way that the commentator couldn't see the boats. However, he knew an ingenious way of telling who was winning at that point: he's heard that a man whose garden was near the river had a flagpole, and he'd hoist the team colour of whichever boat was ahead at that point: dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge. The commentator could just make out the flagpole with binoculars, so he'd confidently announce who was ahead, never letting on to his audience how he knew. This went on for many years, and finally, one year he decided to visit the man and see this famous flagpole close up. But when he got to it, it noticed something: it was impossible to see the Thames from that location. He pointed this out, and asked the man how he could tell which boat was ahead. "Oh, that's easy", he said, "I have a portable radio beside me, and I listen to the commentary on the BBC".
How would the man raise a flag when he heard it on the radio, and the radio announce it based on the flag? If both are waiting for the other, neither would act.
@@IAmUnderscore Because the flag was only for a single point in the race around a bend. There was someone in the lead prior to the bend so basically whoever was in the lead before going out of sight stayed in the lead (on radio at least) until they turned the bend back into sight.
@@snorgardark1908 No, @IAmUnderscore is correct. The announcer was NOT going by who was in the lead going into the turn. He relied solely on the visual image of the flag itself through the binoculars to determine the leader. So when the competitors approached the turn the announcer would've switched to the binos to see just a flagpole, waiting on the leading flag to be raised, while the guy at home waits on the radio announcer to tell him which to raise. It would fail immediately the first time.
This only works if neither team ever passes the other during the bend. It's not a paradox. The person raising the flag would be going off of the call the commentator last made; the positions before the bend. Otherwise, it leads to what was mentioned above. Neither acting.
So much of this relies on actually having a Time Machine. The last time I popped down to ‘Dimensional Instabilities r Us’, they were clean out of time machines. The sales assistant suggested that as the future hadn’t happened yet, there were none to be had at any price. He did suggest that when the right bit of future had happened, time machines would then be available now and indeed at any time in the past present or future.
Talk to Mr. Adams. He's the manager at Dimensional Instabilities 'R' Us. He's the best. Doug has helped me with all kinds of paradoxical issues over the years. And if your into probability drives,, He also makes a mean cup of tea .. extra hot😉
Surely the lack of evidence that a time traveler hasn't announced themselves to the world must mean time travel is never invented? Well, being able to go back in time at least.
Giving you a raise would eat into the profits but not giving you a raise dis-incentivizes you from being productive enough to boost the company profits...
My favorite is the Astley Paradox: If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of the movie Up, he cannot give it to you as he will never give you Up. However, in doing so he lets you down. Thus creating the Astley Paradox.
Stephen King's "November 22, 1963" is quite possibly one of the best books ever written about reverse causation. It's something I've thought about a lot and always agreed with, and Simon mentions it too in this video.
Maybe that's why there is a shooter on the knoll...because of some future time traveler attempted to stop the one shooter, that's why time had to create the 2nd. And when they attempted to stop that guy is why one of the newest theories is that the weird angle is cuz in the panic of the situation one of the secret service guys tripped and accidentally discharged the fatal bullet. 🤔 it's repairing the attempts to stop it. just a quick game of wild suppositions...sorry. lol.
I just love Diogenes. That dude was an OG "No you're wrong and I'll explain why"- kinda dude. Zeno claiming that motion doesn't exist and Diogenes disproving it just by walking in circles or when Plato claimed that Human is just a featherless bi-pedal, so Diogenes plucked feathers off from a chicken and just blasted it on the floor claiming how this is Plato's man in front of his students lmao
I love that when Alexander the great first met him napping naked next to stoop. He stood over him and explained that he was Alexander the great and sought him out because of his notoriety and wanted to meet him and help him in any way he could. Diogenes replied with, "Could you stand over there? You're blocking my sunlight." STRAIGHT GANGSTER AND HARD AF
Zeno was hitting at something very deep but he just couldn't understand it. The mathematics wasn't there and wouldn't be there for 1500 years. That he formulated the concept of an infinite number of things adding up a finite number is a massive intellectual leap. But the idea of the infinite was beyond him so he concluded the premise of the question was invalid and therefore motion is impossible because that's all that made sense to him.
If the prisoner is told that One day this week you will be executed but not on the day that would be a surprise he would be expecting to be executed any day. The surprise would be if the execution did not happen. Therefore prisoner can not be executed becous it would be expected.
@@1tho3 Except in countries like Japan, you don't get to know what day you'll be executed until the executioner knocks on your door; yet there isn't a prison full of people who can't be executed . . .
Prisoner's paradox as told by Simon is actually funny double paradox. Even if the executioner came on Friday, the judge would still be right. After Thursday night, you would be sure you've won, so Friday knock would be a terrible surprise for you :D
Thank you for pointing out the watch paradox in "Somewhere In Time". I remember having a rather ...ahh ... heated discussion with my then wife about the impossibility of the watch. She thought I was being too picky and should just "enjoyed the film". This may have been part of the reason we are no longer together.
The watch surely follows the Bounty paradox. If you had a ship called the Bounty and over the years had to swap out sails, planks, steering wheel and so on, would that still be the ship? How would it be if you took the swapped out parts and built a ship with them. Which ship is the original Bounty? But if your ex-wife differs that much, it would show on other ends, too. Not every marriage is built to last.
If we consider what he said in the video about time refusing to allow a paradox to exist, then it's likely that somewhere along the way the original watch gets swapped out for one like it, so the same watch isn't going through time over and over. Like she gives him the watch, a pickpocket mugs him and swaps the watch with a cheap knock-off without him realizing, he goes back in time and gives it to her, she carries it all those years, gives it to him, he's mugged and it's swapped for a cheap knock-off, etc, so it's always a "new" watch going through time. Time just sprayed some paradox-be-gone on the watch. :)
That's not a paradox. That's management congratulating themselves on THEIR success managing the disposable fool- errr... employees... while they worked at home, but now, management wants to manage the VALUED EMPLOYEES (remembered to use the polite word that time) at work, because it's more convenient for management.
@@devikwolf I think you mean 'deepen my understanding of the language'. 'Learn the language better' would be in reference to the quality of my learning as I actively learn the language. I'm not learning the language, I mastered it sometime after I read my first novel at 4 y.o. Keep going cobber, you'll get there.
@@probusexcogitatoris736 As someone with a BS in CS and has been looking for a job for over a year with not a single interview despite being top of his class because of exactly what Doom stated I can confidently say you are wrong. "Entry level position looking for a recent graduate who hasn't been employed prior. Must have: 8+ years of experience in x,y,z." This is exactly what I see, EVERY FUCKING DAY on most of the job listings for "Entry level". It doesn't matter what position, or business, they almost all have this type of bs.
What about the worlds oldest profession, supposedly prostitution. Peter Hathaway Capstick pointed out there had to be an older profession in order for the prostitute to be paid. So the worlds oldest profession was probably a hunter. Dunno if thats a paradox or just deep thinking.
production feedback: Audio dynamic compression is a great move, but the compression seems to have too fast a release time (inhaled breath comes in loud), and the de-esser needs to aim for a higher frequency.
The answer to the dichotomy paradox always seemed so obvious to me. The idea that you have to take an infinite number of steps to cover a finite distance inherently presupposes that you have to "arrive" at each halfway point and stop there before continuing on meaning that, at some point, for some arbitrary reason you have to start taking smaller and smaller 'steps' so that you don't pass the next halfway point without stopping and counting a new step. There is no reason to do that other than to satisfy the artificial restriction imposed by the wording of the paradox. Another version of this would be filling a cylindrical bucket from hose with a constant stream of water. If the bottom to the top of the bucket is thought of as equivalent to the distance run by the runner in the dichotomy paradox, the water could only satisfy the requirements of the paradox if you stoo the flow of water as you go along each time you hit the next halfway point, but then you are denying the initial condition that I mentioned that you are filling the bucket with a constant flow from a hose. The fact that we observe time flowing and have not actually figured out a way of stopping it indicates that this type of paradox simply doesn't describe the reality we live in so it is a mathematical/philosophical curiosity but not something that describes anything we see I'm the real world such as motion through space.
Yeah, it's actually quite distracting. I wonder if he is coming off some sort of health thing, which also explains why Karl Smallwood took over Biographics.
@@6thwilbury2331 That has absolutely NOTHING to do with why Simon Whistler left Biographics, Geographics, and TopTenz. It was all about personal or business disagreements with the producers (the Harris family) of those 3 channels. If health had anything to do with it, then why did he never stop making videos for almost all of his other many channels?
Dresden Files had a funny retort to the Grandfather paradox Harry: So if I go back in time to kill my grandfather Vadderung: he beats you senseless I suspect
As a mathematical physicist of 8 years, I find none of these that mind blowing. Paradoxes arise from a simple lack in understanding of something somewhere along the line.
With regard to the Lair's Paradox, it seems the true value of a statement isn't always to be found in it but might rely on the web of statements in which it's found/embedded. Wittgensteinian-like.
Well yes, when intentionally manipulating something like a language or equation to break logic then the only thing that statement is making is that language is not perfect method of defining logical statements. Still useful to know.
@@kyleellis1825No, it was just taken out of context. The previous page ended with "So by the aforementioned reasoning I can only come to one conclusion:" and the next page read: "This statement is false." Feels bad, when people assume you're a great philosopher yet all you did was forget to throw the last page of a script into the bin as well.
Years ago, at a science fiction convention, I purchased a button that reads, "The statement on this button is false". It is my favorite. It's even more fun when people tell me, "I don't get it". Then I have to explain to people what a paradox is. 🦆🦆
@@michaelhowell2326The pleasure of explaining things wears off quickly, then got becomes have to. There's a stage after that called figure it out yourself that op clearly hasn't reached yet. It's not that hard to Google shit.
@@levilandes1719 one doesn't wear something like a big pin unless they want it as conversation piece. If it got to the "have to" point, just take it off. And Google is no replacement for human interaction. People are losing that ability.
@@michaelhowell2326 It's a shirt, I have a bunch of t shirts with graphics that I barely pay attention to. A shirt is old to me, not to others, and their curiosity is still their problem and still not mine. Not everyone enjoys human interaction, some people are able to meet that need with minimal contact through impersonal means, such as the comment section of a UA-cam video. And other people's needs are again, their problem, not mine. I'll feed you if you're hungry, but if you want company keep marching.
The surprise paradox ceases to be a paradox because, if you accept the premise of the prisoner's logic, Not being hanged becomes a possibility. This means that even being hung on the Friday becomes a surprise.
Is that what's causing it? I was doing P.A. announcing just a few days ago. I had run across the field to get a pronunciation on a name, then ran back to the box about 20 seconds before I had to start talking. Almost certainly sounded just like Simon does in this video.
Eating an entire pizza is one task, no matter how many slices you cut it into. Running a journey with an end point is one task no matter how many times you want to divide it up.
The sum of an infinite sequence can be a finite number. Once we proved this mathematically it showed the logical fallacy in Zeno's idea. Zeno assumed that the sum of an infinite sequence must be infinity. See numberphile for surprisingly easy to understand examples.
@@philwood5288 the easist example is a joke. an infinite number of mathematicians go into a bar. the 1st order 1 pint, the second orders 1/2 of a pint, the 3rd orders 1/4 of a pint, the 4th orders 1/8 of a pint the barman pours 2 pints and tells them they should know their limit
This is the best explanation that I have seen for visualizing the apparentparadox, though the fundamental error of Zeno's analysis is disregarding that each step becomes shorter in time as it becomes shorter in distance. That is the analysis that gives rise to the mathematical concept of limits.
The steps or yards the runner walks may be divided down, but at some point, the size of the division becomes so small, that he just steps over it. This is also why animation in computers has traditionally had a 1% breaker. The amount of computing power needed to animate beyond that point far exceeds the visible capabilities, so the end of any animation is always a jump we don't see as one.
Regarding the Dichotomy Argument, that reminds me of something I read that relates. A mathematician and (I believe it was) an engineer are put in a room with a beautiful woman and told that they can have their way with her. But they can only approach her every 5 minutes by halving the distance to her. The mathematician storms out saying it's impossible because he'd never reach her. The engineer stays saying eventually he'd be close enough for all practical purposes.
In your example, the distance is halved every time but the duration is always the same (5 minutes), that means the speed is halved too every time so it tends to 0. The mathematician will never be able to reach the woman (in theory at least, because in physics the Planck length seems to be the smallest bit of space possible). In the Dichotomy Argument, both the distance and the duration are halved so the speed remains the same, which means it will take a finite amount of time to run a finite total distance.
Man it's funny I was rambling to my Mom the other day about a version of one of Zeno's paradoxes (the arrow paradox) because it was used to explain asymptotes to me by my honestly amazing Algebra 2 teacher. I had that lesson over a decade ago but it still sticks with me! Took me some time but when my brain finally connected how asymptotes and limits worked together it made infinite limits much easier for me to wrap my head around. There must be some miss information out there because my Algebra 2 teacher said the arrow paradox was debunked by Diogenes firing an arrow and it ya know... hitting the target. Or maybe he was using some creative liberties!
Regarding which came first, "The Chicken or the Egg" paradox/problem of causality, there is a possible resolution. I think this problem/paradox can be solved by substituting the Chicken with a Horse and Donkey, and the Egg with a Mule. By doing this, the direction of causality can be established, and should hold true for other characters or similar scenarios. This is because a Mule is the offspring of a Horse and Donkey, and not the other way around. As far as I can tell, Paradoxes typically have a hidden fallacy masquerading as a truth, thus setting up an unresolvable quandary.
It's also the egg in the sense that eggs existed millions of years before birds, and the egg that hatched the first chicken was not laid by a chicken (they're a hybrid species of two Indian Junglefowl) very much in the same way that neither parent of the mule was a mule.
Comic book logic actually seems very logical to me. The universe itself isn’t thinking of ways to prevent the paradox but say if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, then you wouldn’t exist to go back in those to kill your grandfather. So the only universe to exist would be one in which your grandfather never had you as a grandson. Or you died before the act could be committed. Or you just never decide to commit the act. Or any other thing that prevented you from doing it. So any action you took to change the past would be futile because it is self correcting. I think that’s what the Avengers Endgame writers had in mind when they said they had to return the stones to the moment they were taken from. Although they did change the past when they let Loki escape, that changed the past. So I think if we ever invented time travel we would have unlimited historical knowledge but no way to change it.
Predestination is one of my favorite movies and was a great representation of a Bootstrap Paradox. Recently too Bodies and a more popular show Dark. All utilize the paradox really well.
If they developed the paradox long before crack was invented, then they couldn't have been smoking crack in order to create said paradox. Though you might be able to find a chain of events between the birth of the paradox leading to the creation of crack. Then you could take that crack back in time to have them smoke it in order to develop the paradox that would then lead to the creation of crack and begin the cycle anew. Ironically, creating yet another paradox.
Years ago the tax service I used for my business would send me a huge packet of paperwork. Quad duplicate everything. For a one man business. THIS PAGE HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. So is the page actually blank?
Just a couple of thoughts for some of the paradoxes Bootstrap paradox: when you travel back in time to give anything, information or something physical or a physical interaction, you become the source of the change, and when you go back to the future, it's not how you left it. I understand the paradoxical change implied by who started the closed loop, but the loop became open once you introduced yourself to it. Opening the loop allows for many variations to occur, one of them being that Einstein had the knowledge from the start, but you going back to give him his book didn't teach him about relativity, it just put his thoughts into print. Zeno's paradox: we have an endpoint. If we walk a mile, we know our endpoint. We can divide the endpoint down infinitely, but that doesn't change that we will reach it sometime during our travel. Granted, adding fractions along every step mathematically wont give us a 1:1, but that doesn't change the outcome of us walking a mile.
A favourite of mine: You assert that time travel is real, you boast/brag whatever. Then pick your stooge. Say to them that you can prove Time travel exists and when you do, they have to buy you a drink. Once agreed tell the truth "If time travel doesnt exist, how do we get older?" Then enjoy your drink. The point is, when we talk about Time Travel, people assume going back in time to see/do something or jumping forward in time in order to gwin something, such as see the first manned mission to mars land or see if mankind does move to another planet or whatever. We dont talk about what time it is.
It's not that time travel isn't possible, and indeed we _all_ time travel whenever we change our motion (eg "the faster you move through space the slower you move through time"). Indeed, travelling into the future doesn't create _any_ issues whatsoever (Einsteins "twins paradox" is _not_ a paradox!), it's only travelling into the past that is problematic.
Time doesn't exist, so time travel is meaningless. We have a flawed perception of reality that makes us believe time exists, when in fact there is no such thing as time. Einstein's theory of relativity suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously - with no special “now”. The future to one observer is the past to another. That means time doesn't flow from past to future, as we experience it. Time is an illusion.
Life lesson. If a man says he is lying, you can’t trust him. Same rules as in Scream 4. To quote Sidney, “if you can’t trust him don’t open the door.” If Scream isn’t your franchise then maybe Dune when the Baron killed the Doctor. You can’t trust traitor. Crumbled paper can’t be perfect again so if a man says he’s lying. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not because trust is gone.
An episode of Doctor Who posited the Bootstrap Paradox where the world suddenly doesn't know about Beethoven. The Time Traveler travels back in time with all of Beethoven's works and teaches him (Beethoven) how to play his own music. Beethoven passes the work off as his own and makes no mention of the Time Traveller.
Not quite. In the explanation the time travellers wants the music sheets to be signed by Beethoven. But there is no Beethoven at all. So the time traveler publishes Beethoven's music himself and basically becomes Beethoven.
My favorite thing about this channel is how everyone acts like they're smart in the comments. And then leaves their Google account settings to public so you can see their history. And see the truth. 😅
- "I did not know what I should gift you for your birthday. So, I travelled to the future and had a look." - "Oh cool, a pair of socks... and a paradox!"
But the Zeno's paradox is easy to dispel if you consider time to be a factor. If you assume a constant speed for the completion of the distance then the time for a part of this is going to equal the overall time divided by the length of the sub distance. Thus 1/2 the distance = 1/2 the time, 1/4 distance = 1/4 time etc. So although technically you can subdivide the distance into infinity then the time would subdivide the same amount until an infinite subdivision would equal 0 time.
Regarding the running paradox: at some point, each of the two parts of the divided space will be less than the length of the runner's foot, which automatically means that he has completed the task and moves on to the next one, thus the entire distance is covered.
To answer the zeno paradox involving running a mile, the issue stands that eachnchalleng/task is viewed as if it was the same volume as the previous task. Running a 16th of a mile is not the same as running a 30th, rather you run 2 30ths of a mile to run a 16th. Through everyday life you are solving an infinite number of tasks all to solve one task, if you pick up a toy you are doing one task but are also picking up 4 quarters of the same object. This isnt a paradox but rather an understanding of the fact we are made of an infinite number of parts capable of each solving their own tasks. 1/4 of your hand can lift say 4 rocks, and so on.
For more on the liar paradox, Russell's paradox, Zeno's paradox, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem I recommend reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.
I believe the grandfather paradox is truly not a paradox but misunderstood. If I were to go back in time to kill my grandfather I will always be foiled because I exist. No matter how many times I try he will survive because I exist in the future and energy can not be erased once it exists. So my grandfather will always survive my attempts and/or I will be stopped from trying every single time.
@@vali3033 I don’t believe time travel will ever exist. Just because the equations say it’s possible doesn’t mean in practice it can be achieved. Even if you could send atoms into the future for a few seconds or into the past it won’t translate to humans being able to.
When I was eight, I asked my babysitter why I couldn't pick myself up. I knew I couldn't, I understood that experientially, I was just trying to work through the logical semantics....
Not too long ago I learned about "Diagonal Arguments" in category theory. The Grandfather and Bootstrap paradoxes seem remarkably similar to to famous diagonal arguments (some of which listed in this video): The Liar Paradox, Russel's Paradox, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the halting problem, and the word "heterological." The time travel ones just seem to be causal instantiations of the same thing, where time travel plays the same role as self-reference by allowing events to be their own cause.
I once read an article about studies that were done about studies. Those studies revealed that many studies are either forged, done with a bias or made very unprecisly and that people give studies too much value. I was a stoner back then and really high and i couldn't handle it. "If i believe a study that tells me many studies are wrong than...." 😃
The Darren Shan saga gave a good example for grandfather paradox It’s going into the past won’t stop the events only delay until someone else completes the act for why the person goes back
9:14 In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory by dripping water unto Laura Dern’s hand and the drops take different paths. My idea about the “comic book logic” prevention theory is that each cycle of ‘grandfather dying - you not being born - grandfather living - you being born and going back in time’ plays out differently each time. Eventually a random chance will prevent you killing him (such as him dying in an unrelated accident before having any children), and this becomes what always happened
At school our teacher told us we would have a surprise quiz somewhere next week. I told him it couldn't be on a Friday and explained why, then someone else chimed in that it also couldn't be on Thursday then... when we arrived at the final conclusion the math teacher explained this paradox to us. I love math and logic!
11:00 f Zeno's locomotion paradox is a bad example for unsolvable paradoxes: He actually argues that a sum of ▪︎infinitely many and ▪︎each finite timespans could not be finite. By this time he already has split _a finite distance_ into ▪︎infinitely many ▪︎each finite distances, thus _proving himself_ that a sum of infinitely many each finite quantities _can_ be finite.
The nice thing about Zeno's paradox is that they go away once you accept that neither time nor space is infinately divisible not that this doesn't cause problems of it's own.
I consider Somewhere In Time to be a spiritual movie. Richard needs the watch and faith to go back in time. He goes back in time to 1912 and has a relationship with Elise. While Elise has the watch in her possession, his faith is shattered when he pulls the most insignificant coin, a Lincoln penny dated 1979, out of his pocket. This sends him back to his own time. But here is what is amazing about the movie. Lincoln pennies were first minted in 1909. What shattered Richard’s faith was the 7 in 1979. An insignificant bump on an insignificant coin. The movie is based on the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson. It was filmed in 1979 on Mackinac Island in Michigan. Had they filmed it in any previous year, that scene would not have had the same impact.
6:24 chegg (chicken/egg which came first?) This often comes up in computer programming stuff where you end up manually initializing the thing out of the loop first, "bootstrapping" it.
For some reason, this reminds me how my parents would have me and my two siblings draw names for secret santa christmas gifts. It wasnt hard even as a little kid to figure out that , for example, if i had my sisters name, my brother couldnt, which meant he had my name, and my sister had hers. They did it for several years like that until one of us finally let em know that have 3 names in a secret santa doesnt work lol. We had all figured it out right away.
A long time ago when I took a few university classes in philosophy, an acquaintance told me 'philosophy is just mental masturbation'. These paradoxes reminded me of that and boy, was he right!
Time loops you're talking about reminds me of Harry Potter in the Prisoner of Azkaban. He says "I knew I could do it because I had already done it," when referencing how he was able to cast such a powerful patronus charm.
I read a novel that did a subtle solution to this. The, if I remember correctly, unintentional time traveller ended up doing something that pushed the development of certain technology into being a few decades or so earlier than it should have been. At the end of the novel, they say or think something that, if you pick up on it as a reader, causes you to go "wait a minute, this is incorrect". They note it seems everything turned out just fine despite their accidental interference since they don't remember anything weird and "I had this tech growing up in the xx". But the problem is that tech, I think it was an early smart phone, didn't exist back when they were young. So, the solution applied seems to be that the time traveller's memory retroactively changed without them realising it so that it fits the new timeline.
WAIT, one more thing, I am writing this apart from my first comment because I don't want it to get lost in the rest of what I said, but there is a fantastic series on Netflix which is full of Paradoxes, it's whole thing is paradoxes, lol! It's called Dark, and it is a complete series too, and it has a to do with that whole thing of someone becoming their own grandparent kind of thing, but I won't say too much, because it would spoil it and it is a show full of wonderful twists and turns. It's a German series that Netflix did, it is dubbed, but very well, and the acting is very good too, it is one of my favorite shows ever now. Just wanted to get that out there, but then it was very popular, so most people here have probably already seen it. I've watched a 4 or 5 times myself, even though it is a newer show, I just kept rewatching the other seasons as I waited for the next, lol!
12:00 this paradox description leaves out an important factor: each of the infinite number of tasks would take an infinitely small amount of time. So, you end up with ∞/∞ -- in this case since it can be rightly assumed both infinities would be equally large as they derive from the same linear subdivision, the conclusion would be there is no influence on the time taken overall as the resulting factor would be equal to 1, exactly.
I have always taken the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as being emotional, not physical. You've had a failure, you're feeling down, blue useless etc. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Or, to use a more recent phrase, "suck it up, buttercup" or a slightly older phrase "get over it". Let go of what has you feeling down, perk up and move on!
This was so fun 😊 I've heard of many of these previously, but the in-depth commentary was fascinating! You have an innate talent for holding the viewers' attention, no matter the subject t matter. REALLY enjoy this channel!
that was a really interesting summary, thanks Simon. :) I've always been a fan of The Grandfather Paradox, but I've also always believed that from your perspective (being the one who traveled back in time), nothing would really change... not because of any crazy correcting force intended to "balance the scales", but simply because by traveling through time, you would disconnect yourself entirely from the timeline that you left. this would create a branch in time at the historic point you arrived at, and you would continue your own progression through that new timeline instead. the timeline that resulted in you being born, is technically still in your own personal past. so, no.. I don't think that going back in time to kill your own grandfather would cause you to suddenly cease to exist.
I am only on the 1st paradox and i have it paused just staring at the wall. Our dog is 14 and lost his best friend 8 or 9 months ago to cancer.. our MollyBird. Broke my heart.. and he hasn't been the same since.. and he has been diagnosed with Cognitive Dissonance specifically it is Sundowner's for dogs. The Vet put him on some medications recently that have helped him and the "episodes" i guess aren't as severe or frequent and that has made me happy.. so for the most part he is a lot better but sometimes he will just stand there and stare at the wall for 20 mins and i will walk over and ask him what exactly are you pondering there?? I think he ponders the liars paradox. I know that it has broken my brain for the night and it's just the first one.
Zeno paradoxes were a pillar of my college metaphysics professor’s proof for the existence of a god. When he presented the paradox I was also taking calculus, and for my paper at the end of the semester I had to take a stance and either support or dispute all of the major topics we had covered. I plotted the distance velocity and time in such a way to show that for a given velocity it was impossible for the runner to take longer than the time dictated by their velocity (infinite addition to a finite sum). He said I wasn’t allowed to do that because math and philosophical arguments are different. Still got an A though so I guess it’s ok.
Bloody well done, Simon ‼️ How you got through all of that without tripping up, is a paradox of its own 😊❤ Why was the cat not being alive or dead, Schrödinger not being my favourite chap, not included?
If a problem or question has an answer that causes you to go in a infinite loop then it is not a paradox, it is a logic knot. Paradoxes are impossibilities, imagine if someone gave you a math problem and you got the answer 2=7. You think to yourself, “I must of made a mistake” so you look over the problem and can’t find a mistake. So you redo the entire the problem but slower but you get 2=7. Confused you get a smart person, a proper mathematician and he goes through the same issue, 2=7 and there is no mistakes made and there is nothing wrong with the equation. That is a paradox 2=7. But… Bootstrap Logic-knot doesn’t sound as cool as Bootstrap Paradox There is also Conundrums which are problems/questions that can have a answer that is both correct and incorrect at the same time.
2:08 I am perfectly willing to dismiss it as nonsensical. I also firmly believe that time loops break causality, because causality can be applied both on the microscopic scale (single events) and the macroscopic scale (groups of events). If a time loop is viewed as a macroscopic event, it has no cause, and thus breaks causality. The only ways around this are to imply a progression of timelines (time itself experiencing time, which would then fall victim to the same reasoning and necessitate the existence of an infinite hierarchy of "time"s, which is itself paradoxical or otherwise outside the bounds of logic) or to assert that the universe was originally set up deterministically so that no time travel would ever create a time paradox, which in its turn necessitates the existence of a timeless intelligence to cause the universe to be set up in such a way, which yet again forces us into a conclusion outside the bounds of causality.
Regarding Diogenes, every step we take is a an infinite set of different fractions of distances. So it is possible to complete a set of infinite tasks in a finite amount of time.
Here's another locomotion story. I'm on a train and ask a fellow passenger when it arrives at Cambridge. "11.30" comes the reply. At 11.30 the train is rushing through Cambridge station without even slowing down. The fellow passenger shrugs and says "But it does arrive at Cambridge then. It just doesn't stop there". I then notice he's wearing some kind of toga and sandals. Zeno plays with the useful but fictitious convention of modeling motion as a series of stops.
Remember: you can always choose the Wheatley route and just go with 'False'. More in depth though: you could say that the claim that the statement is false is an attribute by using Higher Order Logic or by treating the false value as pertaining to the meta-logic of the statement, rather than the normal logic. This would be the same as saying the statement, whatever its contents are, is invalid.
Re: Zeno's Paradox. As Henri Bergson pointed out, continuous movement is the reality; "points" are a mathematical fiction by which we analyze movement. Reality isn't a movie broken up into infinitesimal still frames. There is no halfway point - or any points - in which the arrow doesn't move.
8:33 cf Robert A. Heinlein. Time progresses. In your personal future, you go back in time; you appear in the earlier time frame and do whatever you do; you [we presume for the happy ending] disappear back to your present/their future but whatever happened *happened* b/c you *were* there when the event(s) happened. No paradox, you just haven't experienced No Paradox yet until you return.
"That which is in locomotion arrives at a half way stage before it's goal" I feel like this paradox only works if you keep moving the goal. In the example it says that a mile can be infinitely divided but the goal is still one mile. The goal never was the half mile. The half mile was only half way to the goal. So there's no need to keep dividing it unless you change the goal from 1 mile to a half mile.
With the surprise hanging paradox, I wonder if it's possible that the judge had some knowledge that would mean that if he was to word the hanging in the way he did, the prisoner might come to the conclusion that he did? Meaning that the judge explained things as you mentioned leaving the prisoner to conclude the logic he came up with yet the Judge still clearly picking a day for the hanging and there in lies the surprise. The prisoner thought he had some sound knowledge but the judge makes a somewhat random selection of the day causing the surprise in the prisoner. Just a thought!
5:58 damn, u didn't mention Loki season 2,which is pretty much this....who wrote the tva book? Oroboros wrote it from the teachings of He Who Remains, but He Who Remains got his teachings from reading the TVA book by Oroboros coz someone went back in time and gave him that book when he was a child
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Whats with the weird skip to a sponsor in mid sentence at 2:26
A GIFT is something you get for FREE, so a FREE GIFT is an....
Free item you get for free.
?
If I tell you my previous statement was a lie and I'm telling the truth about it then I'm telling the truth in this statement and was lying in the previous also the "who wrote Beethoven" bit in doctor who, he could of wrote it in the first place but took it too him too early and then it seems as if it wrote itself the paradox. I wonder if everything started because of a paradox the opposite of nothing is everything infinitely no start point .. no end
The Grandfather Paradox is pretty easy to solve, actually. It's just that the answer is too boring for Hollywood. The reason the killer exists is because their birth was not prevented. So either the person they killed was not actually their grandfather, or their grandfather was not killed. What makes up the present already takes the past into account, so whatever happened in the past is always what had happened and there is no "changing" the present by altering the past.
no matter the day, I have a dose of Simon and his deep dive into al these amazing topics. I'm sure my family is tired of my shite. stay safe and awesome evryone, Simon, Writers, viewers!
If you got a minute, checkout my links in my bio! xoxo
The Bootstrap Paradox reminds me of something I heard about the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The BBC always covered it on the radio, so there'd be a commentator telling the listeners which team was ahead at every stage. However, at one point, the Thames curved in such a way that the commentator couldn't see the boats. However, he knew an ingenious way of telling who was winning at that point: he's heard that a man whose garden was near the river had a flagpole, and he'd hoist the team colour of whichever boat was ahead at that point: dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge. The commentator could just make out the flagpole with binoculars, so he'd confidently announce who was ahead, never letting on to his audience how he knew.
This went on for many years, and finally, one year he decided to visit the man and see this famous flagpole close up. But when he got to it, it noticed something: it was impossible to see the Thames from that location. He pointed this out, and asked the man how he could tell which boat was ahead. "Oh, that's easy", he said, "I have a portable radio beside me, and I listen to the commentary on the BBC".
How would the man raise a flag when he heard it on the radio, and the radio announce it based on the flag? If both are waiting for the other, neither would act.
@@IAmUnderscore Because the flag was only for a single point in the race around a bend. There was someone in the lead prior to the bend so basically whoever was in the lead before going out of sight stayed in the lead (on radio at least) until they turned the bend back into sight.
@@snorgardark1908 No, @IAmUnderscore is correct. The announcer was NOT going by who was in the lead going into the turn. He relied solely on the visual image of the flag itself through the binoculars to determine the leader. So when the competitors approached the turn the announcer would've switched to the binos to see just a flagpole, waiting on the leading flag to be raised, while the guy at home waits on the radio announcer to tell him which to raise. It would fail immediately the first time.
This only works if neither team ever passes the other during the bend. It's not a paradox. The person raising the flag would be going off of the call the commentator last made; the positions before the bend. Otherwise, it leads to what was mentioned above. Neither acting.
He only raised the flag to tell who was in the lead and the announcer only said who was in the lead. It was not about the final outcome.
So much of this relies on actually having a Time Machine. The last time I popped down to ‘Dimensional Instabilities r Us’, they were clean out of time machines. The sales assistant suggested that as the future hadn’t happened yet, there were none to be had at any price. He did suggest that when the right bit of future had happened, time machines would then be available now and indeed at any time in the past present or future.
Talk to Mr. Adams. He's the manager at Dimensional Instabilities 'R' Us. He's the best. Doug has helped me with all kinds of paradoxical issues over the years. And if your into probability drives,, He also makes a mean cup of tea .. extra hot😉
Back order it, and it will be instantly available. :)
@@RobertRedland I find that improbable, therefore I'll allow it.
Surely the lack of evidence that a time traveler hasn't announced themselves to the world must mean time travel is never invented? Well, being able to go back in time at least.
@@casinodelongething is, lots of people have claimed to be time travelers. Just because nobody believes them doesn’t mean they didn’t do as you say
My favorite paradox is how my company has record profits yet doesnt have the budget to give me a raise
The solution is simple, you are not a manager
hmm i wonder why
Yours too?
Giving you a raise would eat into the profits but not giving you a raise dis-incentivizes you from being productive enough to boost the company profits...
Not a paradox, the cost of running the company also goes up every year
My favorite is the Astley Paradox:
If you ask Rick Astley for his copy of the movie Up, he cannot give it to you as he will never give you Up.
However, in doing so he lets you down. Thus creating the Astley Paradox.
😂😂😂
Naw, he just gives you ones of his extra copies.
🕺🗞
@@kyleellis1825but then he’s giving you up, which he will never do
Up is fiction and therefore a lie. He said he would never tell a lie so he actually he did not let you down. Paradox solved.
Stephen King's "November 22, 1963" is quite possibly one of the best books ever written about reverse causation. It's something I've thought about a lot and always agreed with, and Simon mentions it too in this video.
Maybe that's why there is a shooter on the knoll...because of some future time traveler attempted to stop the one shooter, that's why time had to create the 2nd. And when they attempted to stop that guy is why one of the newest theories is that the weird angle is cuz in the panic of the situation one of the secret service guys tripped and accidentally discharged the fatal bullet. 🤔 it's repairing the attempts to stop it.
just a quick game of wild suppositions...sorry. lol.
I agree. It's something I've thought about a lot. Stephen King did a great job with the concept while writing an awesome book.
I just love Diogenes. That dude was an OG "No you're wrong and I'll explain why"- kinda dude.
Zeno claiming that motion doesn't exist and Diogenes disproving it just by walking in circles or when Plato claimed that Human is just a featherless bi-pedal, so Diogenes plucked feathers off from a chicken and just blasted it on the floor claiming how this is Plato's man in front of his students lmao
Dude was the OG troll. Hilarious as hell 🤣
In other words, proving paradoxes are just social constructs.
That reality doesn't care about the sounds we make.
I love that when Alexander the great first met him napping naked next to stoop. He stood over him and explained that he was Alexander the great and sought him out because of his notoriety and wanted to meet him and help him in any way he could.
Diogenes replied with, "Could you stand over there? You're blocking my sunlight."
STRAIGHT GANGSTER AND HARD AF
He didn’t know calculus back then but he used it well. Zeno is something of an idiot.
Zeno was hitting at something very deep but he just couldn't understand it. The mathematics wasn't there and wouldn't be there for 1500 years. That he formulated the concept of an infinite number of things adding up a finite number is a massive intellectual leap. But the idea of the infinite was beyond him so he concluded the premise of the question was invalid and therefore motion is impossible because that's all that made sense to him.
0:45 - Chapter 1 - Liar paradox
2:25 - Mid roll ads
3:45 - Back to the video
4:40 - Chapter 2 - Bootstrap paradox
7:45 - Chapter 3 - Grandfather paradox
11:00 - Chapter 4 - Zeno's paradoxes
13:40 - Chapter 5 - Unexpected hanging paradox
Bloody legend. Allegedly.
On my waterfront property, 2 boat landing piers washed ashore. We never found the owners. I now have an unsolved pair a docks
That's terrible😂
Haha, I see what you did there
Thanks dad.
That's dumb... I liked it
Awful.
If you think about it, the prisoner will always be executed on the last day, his last day.
Donnie Darko
If the prisoner is told that One day this week you will be executed but not on the day that would be a surprise he would be expecting to be executed any day. The surprise would be if the execution did not happen. Therefore prisoner can not be executed becous it would be expected.
@@1tho3 Except in countries like Japan, you don't get to know what day you'll be executed until the executioner knocks on your door; yet there isn't a prison full of people who can't be executed . . .
and yet...there isn't a definition to 'ecuted'...so how do you ex-ecute somebody ;P
He will never be executed if he requests an all you can eat buffet and just keeps eating forever 😄
Prisoner's paradox as told by Simon is actually funny double paradox. Even if the executioner came on Friday, the judge would still be right. After Thursday night, you would be sure you've won, so Friday knock would be a terrible surprise for you :D
Thank you for pointing out the watch paradox in "Somewhere In Time". I remember having a rather ...ahh ... heated discussion with my then wife about the impossibility of the watch. She thought I was being too picky and should just "enjoyed the film". This may have been part of the reason we are no longer together.
The watch surely follows the Bounty paradox. If you had a ship called the Bounty and over the years had to swap out sails, planks, steering wheel and so on, would that still be the ship? How would it be if you took the swapped out parts and built a ship with them. Which ship is the original Bounty?
But if your ex-wife differs that much, it would show on other ends, too. Not every marriage is built to last.
If we consider what he said in the video about time refusing to allow a paradox to exist, then it's likely that somewhere along the way the original watch gets swapped out for one like it, so the same watch isn't going through time over and over. Like she gives him the watch, a pickpocket mugs him and swaps the watch with a cheap knock-off without him realizing, he goes back in time and gives it to her, she carries it all those years, gives it to him, he's mugged and it's swapped for a cheap knock-off, etc, so it's always a "new" watch going through time. Time just sprayed some paradox-be-gone on the watch. :)
I think you're thinking of the Ship of Thesues @@migga86
My favorite paradox is how "working from home has been a great success" and yet "it's time to return to the daily commute"
That's not a paradox. That's management congratulating themselves on THEIR success managing the disposable fool- errr... employees... while they worked at home, but now, management wants to manage the VALUED EMPLOYEES (remembered to use the polite word that time) at work, because it's more convenient for management.
Quit and start your own business. Come and go as you please. Until then get back to work scrub.
Not at all a paradox. Did you write this three seconds into the video/after hearing of paradoxes? This is a contradiction.
@@PremIndi You should learn the language better.
@@devikwolf I think you mean 'deepen my understanding of the language'. 'Learn the language better' would be in reference to the quality of my learning as I actively learn the language. I'm not learning the language, I mastered it sometime after I read my first novel at 4 y.o. Keep going cobber, you'll get there.
Fry did the nasty in the past-y.
Verily🤣
“Did ya ever get the feeling you're only going with girls 'cause you're supposed to?”
Verily, and that past nastification is what shields him from the Brain Spawn
Are you talking about Stephen Fry?!
_How do you like_ *_THESE_* _cookies_ .. _Sugar?_
I present to you the modern paradox.
You need experience to get the job.
You need the job to get experience.
Tada!
Clearly that is not a paradox, because then all young people would be unemployed.
@@probusexcogitatoris736 As someone with a BS in CS and has been looking for a job for over a year with not a single interview despite being top of his class because of exactly what Doom stated I can confidently say you are wrong. "Entry level position looking for a recent graduate who hasn't been employed prior. Must have: 8+ years of experience in x,y,z." This is exactly what I see, EVERY FUCKING DAY on most of the job listings for "Entry level". It doesn't matter what position, or business, they almost all have this type of bs.
@@probusexcogitatoris736it’s commentary, simmer down republican.
@@xero6912then you manufacture experience. All college activities are experience. All lab or personal project time is experience. You can do it.
What about the worlds oldest profession, supposedly prostitution. Peter Hathaway Capstick pointed out there had to be an older profession in order for the prostitute to be paid. So the worlds oldest profession was probably a hunter. Dunno if thats a paradox or just deep thinking.
I just noticed this guy takes loud short sharp breaths inbetween every sentence and now i cant get passed it. My gift to you
There's more to it than that....
Oh yeah that’s really annoying, thanks I hate it & can’t finish the vid now
production feedback: Audio dynamic compression is a great move, but the compression seems to have too fast a release time (inhaled breath comes in loud), and the de-esser needs to aim for a higher frequency.
Thank goodness someone else noticed. I stopped watching after a minute because of this. So irritating listening to that breathing!
@@paulbessell6154 Yeah, I started focusing on the breathing vs the content. Weird.
I love the stories about how sassy Diogenes was, even if some likely never actually happened.
Knowing Diogenes, it most certainly did happen😂
The answer to the dichotomy paradox always seemed so obvious to me. The idea that you have to take an infinite number of steps to cover a finite distance inherently presupposes that you have to "arrive" at each halfway point and stop there before continuing on meaning that, at some point, for some arbitrary reason you have to start taking smaller and smaller 'steps' so that you don't pass the next halfway point without stopping and counting a new step. There is no reason to do that other than to satisfy the artificial restriction imposed by the wording of the paradox.
Another version of this would be filling a cylindrical bucket from hose with a constant stream of water. If the bottom to the top of the bucket is thought of as equivalent to the distance run by the runner in the dichotomy paradox, the water could only satisfy the requirements of the paradox if you stoo the flow of water as you go along each time you hit the next halfway point, but then you are denying the initial condition that I mentioned that you are filling the bucket with a constant flow from a hose. The fact that we observe time flowing and have not actually figured out a way of stopping it indicates that this type of paradox simply doesn't describe the reality we live in so it is a mathematical/philosophical curiosity but not something that describes anything we see I'm the real world such as motion through space.
Those inhalations are strong and sharp. Is he fighting off and talking through an asthma attack?
No it's too take in as much air in a short time to keep his pace. Microphones are a bitch for picking up moving air
@@christopherhammond9467 did you just explain breathing to me? 🤣
Yeah, it's actually quite distracting. I wonder if he is coming off some sort of health thing, which also explains why Karl Smallwood took over Biographics.
@@6thwilbury2331 that’s a thought. I was thinking it was something he developed or fell into over time and a new mic was picking it up.
@@6thwilbury2331 That has absolutely NOTHING to do with why Simon Whistler left Biographics, Geographics, and TopTenz. It was all about personal or business disagreements with the producers (the Harris family) of those 3 channels. If health had anything to do with it, then why did he never stop making videos for almost all of his other many channels?
Here's a paradox. I pay to not watch ads on UA-cam. Yet I have to always watch ads on UA-cam.
Dresden Files had a funny retort to the Grandfather paradox
Harry: So if I go back in time to kill my grandfather
Vadderung: he beats you senseless I suspect
Less commentary on the paradox and more Vadderung being one of the few who knows who Harry's granddad is, but still :D
As a mathematical physicist of 8 years, I find none of these that mind blowing. Paradoxes arise from a simple lack in understanding of something somewhere along the line.
With regard to the Lair's Paradox, it seems the true value of a statement isn't always to be found in it but might rely on the web of statements in which it's found/embedded. Wittgensteinian-like.
Wow, when I was 8 years old I couldn't do simple math!!
Well yes, when intentionally manipulating something like a language or equation to break logic then the only thing that statement is making is that language is not perfect method of defining logical statements.
Still useful to know.
It was just someone with poor hand writing. It's really
"this State Men tis falsetto."@@phrontifugist
@@kyleellis1825No, it was just taken out of context. The previous page ended with "So by the aforementioned reasoning I can only come to one conclusion:" and the next page read: "This statement is false." Feels bad, when people assume you're a great philosopher yet all you did was forget to throw the last page of a script into the bin as well.
Years ago, at a science fiction convention, I purchased a button that reads, "The statement on this button is false". It is my favorite. It's even more fun when people tell me, "I don't get it". Then I have to explain to people what a paradox is. 🦆🦆
How does anyone above the age of 10 not know what a paradox is. Thats amazing.
Then you "got" to explain?
@@michaelhowell2326The pleasure of explaining things wears off quickly, then got becomes have to. There's a stage after that called figure it out yourself that op clearly hasn't reached yet. It's not that hard to Google shit.
@@levilandes1719 one doesn't wear something like a big pin unless they want it as conversation piece. If it got to the "have to" point, just take it off. And Google is no replacement for human interaction. People are losing that ability.
@@michaelhowell2326 It's a shirt, I have a bunch of t shirts with graphics that I barely pay attention to. A shirt is old to me, not to others, and their curiosity is still their problem and still not mine. Not everyone enjoys human interaction, some people are able to meet that need with minimal contact through impersonal means, such as the comment section of a UA-cam video. And other people's needs are again, their problem, not mine. I'll feed you if you're hungry, but if you want company keep marching.
The surprise paradox ceases to be a paradox because, if you accept the premise of the prisoner's logic, Not being hanged becomes a possibility. This means that even being hung on the Friday becomes a surprise.
Simon's new channel: The Whistler Zone
The speeding up and cutting is making your breathing in so prominent
Yes. It gets very distracting.
I though it was just me- it is unusually loud in this one
Is that what's causing it?
I was doing P.A. announcing just a few days ago. I had run across the field to get a pronunciation on a name, then ran back to the box about 20 seconds before I had to start talking. Almost certainly sounded just like Simon does in this video.
I came to the comments to make sure it wasn't just me! Thank you for the validation.
Ok, glad I'm not the only one that noticed it.
Eating an entire pizza is one task, no matter how many slices you cut it into. Running a journey with an end point is one task no matter how many times you want to divide it up.
Would not that runner's foot and or stride would be the limiting factor in the number of divisions one could make along his path?
The sum of an infinite sequence can be a finite number. Once we proved this mathematically it showed the logical fallacy in Zeno's idea. Zeno assumed that the sum of an infinite sequence must be infinity. See numberphile for surprisingly easy to understand examples.
@@philwood5288 the easist example is a joke.
an infinite number of mathematicians go into a bar.
the 1st order 1 pint, the second orders 1/2 of a pint, the 3rd orders 1/4 of a pint, the 4th orders 1/8 of a pint
the barman pours 2 pints and tells them they should know their limit
This is the best explanation that I have seen for visualizing the apparentparadox, though the fundamental error of Zeno's analysis is disregarding that each step becomes shorter in time as it becomes shorter in distance. That is the analysis that gives rise to the mathematical concept of limits.
The steps or yards the runner walks may be divided down, but at some point, the size of the division becomes so small, that he just steps over it.
This is also why animation in computers has traditionally had a 1% breaker. The amount of computing power needed to animate beyond that point far exceeds the visible capabilities, so the end of any animation is always a jump we don't see as one.
Regarding the Dichotomy Argument, that reminds me of something I read that relates. A mathematician and (I believe it was) an engineer are put in a room with a beautiful woman and told that they can have their way with her. But they can only approach her every 5 minutes by halving the distance to her. The mathematician storms out saying it's impossible because he'd never reach her. The engineer stays saying eventually he'd be close enough for all practical purposes.
In your example, the distance is halved every time but the duration is always the same (5 minutes), that means the speed is halved too every time so it tends to 0. The mathematician will never be able to reach the woman (in theory at least, because in physics the Planck length seems to be the smallest bit of space possible).
In the Dichotomy Argument, both the distance and the duration are halved so the speed remains the same, which means it will take a finite amount of time to run a finite total distance.
Man it's funny I was rambling to my Mom the other day about a version of one of Zeno's paradoxes (the arrow paradox) because it was used to explain asymptotes to me by my honestly amazing Algebra 2 teacher. I had that lesson over a decade ago but it still sticks with me! Took me some time but when my brain finally connected how asymptotes and limits worked together it made infinite limits much easier for me to wrap my head around. There must be some miss information out there because my Algebra 2 teacher said the arrow paradox was debunked by Diogenes firing an arrow and it ya know... hitting the target. Or maybe he was using some creative liberties!
Thanks Simon, Is there any thing no matter how difficult, that this man cannot explain and make perfectly understandable.
All these paradoxes can be solved by understanding just two simple premises:
1. Lies exist
2. Time travel doesn’t
This is probably the most logical comment here... and thus, is ignored.
⚠️Warning the following text is a joke⚠️
But it could. What if someone went back in time and prevented time travel from ever existing?
@@gunner_melon445 - OMG! You just stopped me from killing my grandfather.
@@markgearing 😂
One of my favorite lines from a video game.
"History abhors a paradox."
Regarding which came first, "The Chicken or the Egg" paradox/problem of causality, there is a possible resolution. I think this problem/paradox can be solved by substituting the Chicken with a Horse and Donkey, and the Egg with a Mule. By doing this, the direction of causality can be established, and should hold true for other characters or similar scenarios. This is because a Mule is the offspring of a Horse and Donkey, and not the other way around.
As far as I can tell, Paradoxes typically have a hidden fallacy masquerading as a truth, thus setting up an unresolvable quandary.
It's also the egg in the sense that eggs existed millions of years before birds, and the egg that hatched the first chicken was not laid by a chicken (they're a hybrid species of two Indian Junglefowl) very much in the same way that neither parent of the mule was a mule.
The egg was laid by an evolutionary pre-chicken and it mutated enough to be the final nugget leading to chickendom...
@@chezsnailez Looks like it lead to "chickendoom." 😉
…exactly. They are simply a series of words in a nonsensical order that the “big brains” attempt to “solve.” Too funny.
What laid the pre-evo chicken, what laid that, what laid that, back to the first cellular life form. Which came first, the microbe or the clone?
Comic book logic actually seems very logical to me. The universe itself isn’t thinking of ways to prevent the paradox but say if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, then you wouldn’t exist to go back in those to kill your grandfather. So the only universe to exist would be one in which your grandfather never had you as a grandson. Or you died before the act could be committed. Or you just never decide to commit the act. Or any other thing that prevented you from doing it. So any action you took to change the past would be futile because it is self correcting. I think that’s what the Avengers Endgame writers had in mind when they said they had to return the stones to the moment they were taken from. Although they did change the past when they let Loki escape, that changed the past. So I think if we ever invented time travel we would have unlimited historical knowledge but no way to change it.
So the time travel stuff, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff?
Too much Dr Who for you young lady.
Alons-y! Doctor Who is actually where I first learned about the bootstrap paradox
@@43bigstevePeter Capaldi and Mozart?
That sentence got away from you.
@@Chris-hx3om yep, that’s the one!
Predestination is one of my favorite movies and was a great representation of a Bootstrap Paradox. Recently too Bodies and a more popular show Dark. All utilize the paradox really well.
who ever thought up these ideas was smoking some crack while thinking about this stuff
Yep, most of them involve time travel or just semantics, and are therefore not practical or even possible to test.
If they developed the paradox long before crack was invented, then they couldn't have been smoking crack in order to create said paradox. Though you might be able to find a chain of events between the birth of the paradox leading to the creation of crack. Then you could take that crack back in time to have them smoke it in order to develop the paradox that would then lead to the creation of crack and begin the cycle anew. Ironically, creating yet another paradox.
Years ago the tax service I used for my business would send me a huge packet of paperwork. Quad duplicate everything. For a one man business. THIS PAGE HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. So is the page actually blank?
There's an episode of Doctor Who that goes over the boot strap paradox
"It's the Boot Strap paradox, google it"
Peter Capaldi doing a good job explaining it. 😁
Just a couple of thoughts for some of the paradoxes
Bootstrap paradox: when you travel back in time to give anything, information or something physical or a physical interaction, you become the source of the change, and when you go back to the future, it's not how you left it. I understand the paradoxical change implied by who started the closed loop, but the loop became open once you introduced yourself to it. Opening the loop allows for many variations to occur, one of them being that Einstein had the knowledge from the start, but you going back to give him his book didn't teach him about relativity, it just put his thoughts into print.
Zeno's paradox: we have an endpoint. If we walk a mile, we know our endpoint. We can divide the endpoint down infinitely, but that doesn't change that we will reach it sometime during our travel. Granted, adding fractions along every step mathematically wont give us a 1:1, but that doesn't change the outcome of us walking a mile.
A favourite of mine: You assert that time travel is real, you boast/brag whatever. Then pick your stooge. Say to them that you can prove Time travel exists and when you do, they have to buy you a drink. Once agreed tell the truth "If time travel doesnt exist, how do we get older?"
Then enjoy your drink.
The point is, when we talk about Time Travel, people assume going back in time to see/do something or jumping forward in time in order to gwin something, such as see the first manned mission to mars land or see if mankind does move to another planet or whatever. We dont talk about what time it is.
Nice. 😆 We are all traveling through time at 1 second per second.
It's not that time travel isn't possible, and indeed we _all_ time travel whenever we change our motion (eg "the faster you move through space the slower you move through time"). Indeed, travelling into the future doesn't create _any_ issues whatsoever (Einsteins "twins paradox" is _not_ a paradox!), it's only travelling into the past that is problematic.
Time doesn't exist, so time travel is meaningless. We have a flawed perception of reality that makes us believe time exists, when in fact there is no such thing as time.
Einstein's theory of relativity suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously - with no special “now”. The future to one observer is the past to another. That means time doesn't flow from past to future, as we experience it. Time is an illusion.
Life lesson. If a man says he is lying, you can’t trust him. Same rules as in Scream 4. To quote Sidney, “if you can’t trust him don’t open the door.” If Scream isn’t your franchise then maybe Dune when the Baron killed the Doctor. You can’t trust traitor. Crumbled paper can’t be perfect again so if a man says he’s lying. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not because trust is gone.
Pinocchio says "my nose will now grow"
*the universe implodes*
It just wouldn’t grow. Pinocchio is not lying with this statement, he’s simply wrong. Being wrong isn’t lying.
An episode of Doctor Who posited the Bootstrap Paradox where the world suddenly doesn't know about Beethoven. The Time Traveler travels back in time with all of Beethoven's works and teaches him (Beethoven) how to play his own music. Beethoven passes the work off as his own and makes no mention of the Time Traveller.
Not quite. In the explanation the time travellers wants the music sheets to be signed by Beethoven. But there is no Beethoven at all. So the time traveler publishes Beethoven's music himself and basically becomes Beethoven.
My favorite thing about this channel is how everyone acts like they're smart in the comments. And then leaves their Google account settings to public so you can see their history. And see the truth. 😅
- "I did not know what I should gift you for your birthday. So, I travelled to the future and had a look."
- "Oh cool, a pair of socks... and a paradox!"
Two minutes in and my smooth brain hurts already
But the Zeno's paradox is easy to dispel if you consider time to be a factor. If you assume a constant speed for the completion of the distance then the time for a part of this is going to equal the overall time divided by the length of the sub distance. Thus 1/2 the distance = 1/2 the time, 1/4 distance = 1/4 time etc. So although technically you can subdivide the distance into infinity then the time would subdivide the same amount until an infinite subdivision would equal 0 time.
Regarding the running paradox: at some point, each of the two parts of the divided space will be less than the length of the runner's foot, which automatically means that he has completed the task and moves on to the next one, thus the entire distance is covered.
Sigh. Try spreading your arms out wide and then bringing them in by halves as if going to clap your hands together... No overlap there.
@@simesaid you're assuming my hands have 0 width
The surprise hanging paradox: He eliminated all 5 days and was hung anyway, that's the surprise.
Time travel is obviously not possible, or someone would have stopped the Kardashians from being born....
Or they did go back in time but couldn't stop them being born because they didn't stop them being born
WOWO HAHAHHHAHA YOU ARE SO FUNNY !!! HAHAHAHSHS WOW
If there will ever be time machines there have always been time machines.
To answer the zeno paradox involving running a mile, the issue stands that eachnchalleng/task is viewed as if it was the same volume as the previous task. Running a 16th of a mile is not the same as running a 30th, rather you run 2 30ths of a mile to run a 16th. Through everyday life you are solving an infinite number of tasks all to solve one task, if you pick up a toy you are doing one task but are also picking up 4 quarters of the same object. This isnt a paradox but rather an understanding of the fact we are made of an infinite number of parts capable of each solving their own tasks. 1/4 of your hand can lift say 4 rocks, and so on.
What if you’re like Fry and are your own grandfather?🤔
For more on the liar paradox, Russell's paradox, Zeno's paradox, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem I recommend reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.
I believe the grandfather paradox is truly not a paradox but misunderstood. If I were to go back in time to kill my grandfather I will always be foiled because I exist. No matter how many times I try he will survive because I exist in the future and energy can not be erased once it exists. So my grandfather will always survive my attempts and/or I will be stopped from trying every single time.
What if it’s not a paradox because it hinges on time travel being possible which to our limited knowledge is not.
@@vali3033 I don’t believe time travel will ever exist. Just because the equations say it’s possible doesn’t mean in practice it can be achieved. Even if you could send atoms into the future for a few seconds or into the past it won’t translate to humans being able to.
When I was eight, I asked my babysitter why I couldn't pick myself up.
I knew I couldn't, I understood that experientially, I was just trying to work through the logical semantics....
Only pure secularists cannot solve these paradoxes.
Only a pure theist could say such a thing.
Let me guess: JESUS DID IT
No thanks, I have a mind
Not too long ago I learned about "Diagonal Arguments" in category theory. The Grandfather and Bootstrap paradoxes seem remarkably similar to to famous diagonal arguments (some of which listed in this video): The Liar Paradox, Russel's Paradox, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the halting problem, and the word "heterological."
The time travel ones just seem to be causal instantiations of the same thing, where time travel plays the same role as self-reference by allowing events to be their own cause.
I once read an article about studies that were done about studies. Those studies revealed that many studies are either forged, done with a bias or made very unprecisly and that people give studies too much value. I was a stoner back then and really high and i couldn't handle it. "If i believe a study that tells me many studies are wrong than...." 😃
The Darren Shan saga gave a good example for grandfather paradox
It’s going into the past won’t stop the events only delay until someone else completes the act for why the person goes back
Zeno's paradoxes are fascinating. I believe that they prove that space and time are discrete.
9:14 In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory by dripping water unto Laura Dern’s hand and the drops take different paths. My idea about the “comic book logic” prevention theory is that each cycle of ‘grandfather dying - you not being born - grandfather living - you being born and going back in time’ plays out differently each time. Eventually a random chance will prevent you killing him (such as him dying in an unrelated accident before having any children), and this becomes what always happened
At school our teacher told us we would have a surprise quiz somewhere next week. I told him it couldn't be on a Friday and explained why, then someone else chimed in that it also couldn't be on Thursday then... when we arrived at the final conclusion the math teacher explained this paradox to us. I love math and logic!
11:00 f
Zeno's locomotion paradox is a bad example for unsolvable paradoxes: He actually argues that a sum of
▪︎infinitely many and
▪︎each finite
timespans could not be finite. By this time he already has split _a finite distance_ into
▪︎infinitely many
▪︎each finite
distances, thus _proving himself_ that a sum of infinitely many each finite quantities _can_ be finite.
The nice thing about Zeno's paradox is that they go away once you accept that neither time nor space is infinately divisible not that this doesn't cause problems of it's own.
I consider Somewhere In Time to be a spiritual movie. Richard needs the watch and faith to go back in time. He goes back in time to 1912 and has a relationship with Elise. While Elise has the watch in her possession, his faith is shattered when he pulls the most insignificant coin, a Lincoln penny dated 1979, out of his pocket. This sends him back to his own time. But here is what is amazing about the movie. Lincoln pennies were first minted in 1909. What shattered Richard’s faith was the 7 in 1979. An insignificant bump on an insignificant coin.
The movie is based on the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson. It was filmed in 1979 on Mackinac Island in Michigan. Had they filmed it in any previous year, that scene would not have had the same impact.
My favourites are "I lie all the time & that's the truth" & "All narcissists are self-reverential".
6:24 chegg (chicken/egg which came first?) This often comes up in computer programming stuff where you end up manually initializing the thing out of the loop first, "bootstrapping" it.
For some reason, this reminds me how my parents would have me and my two siblings draw names for secret santa christmas gifts. It wasnt hard even as a little kid to figure out that , for example, if i had my sisters name, my brother couldnt, which meant he had my name, and my sister had hers.
They did it for several years like that until one of us finally let em know that have 3 names in a secret santa doesnt work lol. We had all figured it out right away.
A long time ago when I took a few university classes in philosophy, an acquaintance told me 'philosophy is just mental masturbation'. These paradoxes reminded me of that and boy, was he right!
Time loops you're talking about reminds me of Harry Potter in the Prisoner of Azkaban. He says "I knew I could do it because I had already done it," when referencing how he was able to cast such a powerful patronus charm.
Zeno; I interpret it as a metaphor for how one can perceive one’s own aging in relation to one’s unpredictable and inevitable demise.
I read a novel that did a subtle solution to this. The, if I remember correctly, unintentional time traveller ended up doing something that pushed the development of certain technology into being a few decades or so earlier than it should have been. At the end of the novel, they say or think something that, if you pick up on it as a reader, causes you to go "wait a minute, this is incorrect". They note it seems everything turned out just fine despite their accidental interference since they don't remember anything weird and "I had this tech growing up in the xx". But the problem is that tech, I think it was an early smart phone, didn't exist back when they were young.
So, the solution applied seems to be that the time traveller's memory retroactively changed without them realising it so that it fits the new timeline.
WAIT, one more thing, I am writing this apart from my first comment because I don't want it to get lost in the rest of what I said, but there is a fantastic series on Netflix which is full of Paradoxes, it's whole thing is paradoxes, lol! It's called Dark, and it is a complete series too, and it has a to do with that whole thing of someone becoming their own grandparent kind of thing, but I won't say too much, because it would spoil it and it is a show full of wonderful twists and turns. It's a German series that Netflix did, it is dubbed, but very well, and the acting is very good too, it is one of my favorite shows ever now. Just wanted to get that out there, but then it was very popular, so most people here have probably already seen it. I've watched a 4 or 5 times myself, even though it is a newer show, I just kept rewatching the other seasons as I waited for the next, lol!
12:00 this paradox description leaves out an important factor: each of the infinite number of tasks would take an infinitely small amount of time. So, you end up with ∞/∞ -- in this case since it can be rightly assumed both infinities would be equally large as they derive from the same linear subdivision, the conclusion would be there is no influence on the time taken overall as the resulting factor would be equal to 1, exactly.
I have always taken the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as being emotional, not physical. You've had a failure, you're feeling down, blue useless etc. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Or, to use a more recent phrase, "suck it up, buttercup" or a slightly older phrase "get over it". Let go of what has you feeling down, perk up and move on!
This was so fun 😊 I've heard of many of these previously, but the in-depth commentary was fascinating!
You have an innate talent for holding the viewers' attention, no matter the subject t matter.
REALLY enjoy this channel!
that was a really interesting summary, thanks Simon. :)
I've always been a fan of The Grandfather Paradox, but I've also always believed that from your perspective (being the one who traveled back in time), nothing would really change... not because of any crazy correcting force intended to "balance the scales", but simply because by traveling through time, you would disconnect yourself entirely from the timeline that you left. this would create a branch in time at the historic point you arrived at, and you would continue your own progression through that new timeline instead.
the timeline that resulted in you being born, is technically still in your own personal past. so, no.. I don't think that going back in time to kill your own grandfather would cause you to suddenly cease to exist.
I suppose it might suffice to say: "time is relative to the person experiencing it".
The boot straps/Einstein paradox is the exact premise of bill and Ted's excellent adventure lol
Somewhere in Time is one of my favorite movies! So underrated.
I am only on the 1st paradox and i have it paused just staring at the wall. Our dog is 14 and lost his best friend 8 or 9 months ago to cancer.. our MollyBird. Broke my heart.. and he hasn't been the same since.. and he has been diagnosed with Cognitive Dissonance specifically it is Sundowner's for dogs. The Vet put him on some medications recently that have helped him and the "episodes" i guess aren't as severe or frequent and that has made me happy.. so for the most part he is a lot better but sometimes he will just stand there and stare at the wall for 20 mins and i will walk over and ask him what exactly are you pondering there?? I think he ponders the liars paradox. I know that it has broken my brain for the night and it's just the first one.
Zeno paradoxes were a pillar of my college metaphysics professor’s proof for the existence of a god. When he presented the paradox I was also taking calculus, and for my paper at the end of the semester I had to take a stance and either support or dispute all of the major topics we had covered.
I plotted the distance velocity and time in such a way to show that for a given velocity it was impossible for the runner to take longer than the time dictated by their velocity (infinite addition to a finite sum). He said I wasn’t allowed to do that because math and philosophical arguments are different. Still got an A though so I guess it’s ok.
Rick and Morty is the best example of the Bootstrap Paradox Theory.
Bloody well done, Simon ‼️
How you got through all of that without tripping up, is a paradox of its own 😊❤
Why was the cat not being alive or dead, Schrödinger not being my favourite chap, not included?
It's not unsolvable.
If a problem or question has an answer that causes you to go in a infinite loop then it is not a paradox, it is a logic knot.
Paradoxes are impossibilities, imagine if someone gave you a math problem and you got the answer 2=7. You think to yourself, “I must of made a mistake” so you look over the problem and can’t find a mistake. So you redo the entire the problem but slower but you get 2=7. Confused you get a smart person, a proper mathematician and he goes through the same issue, 2=7 and there is no mistakes made and there is nothing wrong with the equation. That is a paradox 2=7.
But… Bootstrap Logic-knot doesn’t sound as cool as Bootstrap Paradox
There is also Conundrums which are problems/questions that can have a answer that is both correct and incorrect at the same time.
2:08 I am perfectly willing to dismiss it as nonsensical. I also firmly believe that time loops break causality, because causality can be applied both on the microscopic scale (single events) and the macroscopic scale (groups of events). If a time loop is viewed as a macroscopic event, it has no cause, and thus breaks causality. The only ways around this are to imply a progression of timelines (time itself experiencing time, which would then fall victim to the same reasoning and necessitate the existence of an infinite hierarchy of "time"s, which is itself paradoxical or otherwise outside the bounds of logic) or to assert that the universe was originally set up deterministically so that no time travel would ever create a time paradox, which in its turn necessitates the existence of a timeless intelligence to cause the universe to be set up in such a way, which yet again forces us into a conclusion outside the bounds of causality.
It's a nonsensical system on its own, requiring a reference to something else. No paradox here.
Regarding Diogenes, every step we take is a an infinite set of different fractions of distances. So it is possible to complete a set of infinite tasks in a finite amount of time.
Here's another locomotion story. I'm on a train and ask a fellow passenger when it arrives at Cambridge. "11.30" comes the reply. At 11.30 the train is rushing through Cambridge station without even slowing down. The fellow passenger shrugs and says "But it does arrive at Cambridge then. It just doesn't stop there". I then notice he's wearing some kind of toga and sandals. Zeno plays with the useful but fictitious convention of modeling motion as a series of stops.
Remember: you can always choose the Wheatley route and just go with 'False'.
More in depth though: you could say that the claim that the statement is false is an attribute by using Higher Order Logic or by treating the false value as pertaining to the meta-logic of the statement, rather than the normal logic. This would be the same as saying the statement, whatever its contents are, is invalid.
Re: Zeno's Paradox. As Henri Bergson pointed out, continuous movement is the reality; "points" are a mathematical fiction by which we analyze movement. Reality isn't a movie broken up into infinitesimal still frames. There is no halfway point - or any points - in which the arrow doesn't move.
8:33 cf Robert A. Heinlein. Time progresses. In your personal future, you go back in time; you appear in the earlier time frame and do whatever you do; you [we presume for the happy ending] disappear back to your present/their future but whatever happened *happened* b/c you *were* there when the event(s) happened. No paradox, you just haven't experienced No Paradox yet until you return.
My ears pricked up when you were explaining the great skincare paradox. Then I realised you were selling me something.
Burton Cummings of the Guess Who wrote a song with the lyric "enough of riddles that just play with time".
G'day Simon,
One of my favourite shirts says...
"I'm Confused, No Wait... Maybe I'm Not" 😁 I love wearing it
I don’t approve this message👍🏾
"That which is in locomotion arrives at a half way stage before it's goal" I feel like this paradox only works if you keep moving the goal. In the example it says that a mile can be infinitely divided but the goal is still one mile. The goal never was the half mile. The half mile was only half way to the goal. So there's no need to keep dividing it unless you change the goal from 1 mile to a half mile.
With the surprise hanging paradox, I wonder if it's possible that the judge had some knowledge that would mean that if he was to word the hanging in the way he did, the prisoner might come to the conclusion that he did?
Meaning that the judge explained things as you mentioned leaving the prisoner to conclude the logic he came up with yet the Judge still clearly picking a day for the hanging and there in lies the surprise.
The prisoner thought he had some sound knowledge but the judge makes a somewhat random selection of the day causing the surprise in the prisoner.
Just a thought!
This is the best episode on any of your channels I have seen so far, Simon.
5:58 damn, u didn't mention Loki season 2,which is pretty much this....who wrote the tva book? Oroboros wrote it from the teachings of He Who Remains, but He Who Remains got his teachings from reading the TVA book by Oroboros coz someone went back in time and gave him that book when he was a child
The Twelfth Doctor’s explanation of the Bootstrap Paradox is the best.