With some of the recent comments over The Time Travelers Wife and its "accuracy", it got me to thinking. Outside of bad sentence structures, are there any real paradoxes? It kind of seems like the word "paradox" is a paradox, since a paradox can only happen in fiction. So I'm curious what others think, can anyone point me in the direction of a real paradox?
Don't give me fictional or unproven paradoxes such as going back in time and killing your father before you were born (I'm looking at you Jonathan).
5 comments:
interesting. the study of logic intrigues me, so this was an interesting thing for me to read about. In my brief 20 minutes of reading about and thinking of paradoxes, I think the closest thing would be "moral dilemmas." I want to love my neighbor, but what if he is pointing a gun at my head. If he kills me, then I am unable to love him. If I fight, then I am not able to love him. Another example would be stealing to feed your family. I can't afford to buy food, and my children are going hungry. So I steal some food, and get caught and go to jail, then my children still go hungry.
Also, circular reasoning is a form of paradoxes. From R and H "Cinderella": "do I love you because your beautiful or are you beautiful because I love you?" or the question, "which came first, the chicken or the egg." Of course, we know the truth about that, but there are other forms of circular reasoning. Another example is: I live to work and I work to live.
Okay I tried to find a real paradox, but I can't. It seems like you are correct in saying that there can't be any "real" paradox's... which is interesting.
It is interesting that there are no real paradoxes and my opinion as to why is that the universe is built on truth. I am not saying what truth that is but how we begin and how we end, or if we end- that is already set... something will happen and it cannot defy itself (which is what a paradox is, I guess). So all laws pertaining to also cannot defy themselves. Regardless, if I ever invent a high school, we would be the Mountain Valley Paradoxes and no one would know what the mascot looks like because he would appear only when everybody's eyes were closed.
The word paradox has been romantized by science fiction. The actual definition is:
"A logically valid argument based on premises that are generally accepted as true, yielding either a contradiction or conclusion that conflicts with other generally accepted beliefs."
There are many types of paradoxes. If you were born on a leap year, according to our system of B-days, you would be much younger than you actually are. This next paradox is one Sherlock Holmes would appreciate. If I stand in the doorway of a room then I am not in the room, yet I standing in the room. Jared, you are the math guru, I would suspect math paradoxes occur more than any other, along with the sciences.
Lastly, there is something romantic and grand about a time paradox in fiction. It makes for interesting stories. Time paradoxes have actually been disproven by modern science theories. The reigning theories now state that we live in not a single universe, but one with multiple universes, w/ parallel worlds. This concept is so hard for humans to grasp that I'll bet I lost about half of the readers. So, in conclusion, go with the flow, time paradoxes are meant to make science fiction fun and interesting.
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