ID:23525
 
Awhile ago someone posted a so called "Paradox" about something called Toxin X or something rather.... I wasn't listening.

That wasn't a paradox. A paradox is an apparently true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition. Typically, either the statements in question do not really imply the contradiction, the puzzling result is not really a contradiction, or the premises themselves are not all really true or cannot all be true together. The recognition of ambiguities, equivocations, and unstated assumptions underlying known paradoxes has led to significant advances in science, philosophy and mathematics.

In the other guys example, you could have just drank the toxin and been ill for awhile. No biggie. Heres my example.

You have a time travel machine. Assuming they existed. You decide to travel back in time 10 minutes to tell yourself not to travel back in time. Actually, incase your a stubborn asshole, you go back 10 minutes and kill yourself.

Well crap. Your not alive to go back in time. But then, you never went back in time and you never killed yourself. But now your alive, and your going to travel back in time. To kill yourself. See? THATS a Paradox.

....Im sorry, you lost me. If i could go back in time, I would go far enough back to tell myself the numbers to the jackpot.
This is one of the reasons time travel has always been a problem. If a time machine was created today, and you went back in time to 1900, then you would have gone back before the time machine existed. But if the time machine never existed, how could you have gone back in time?

We could easily find a way to go back in time, but the problem would be going back in time BEFORE The creation of the machine. This is sort of off topic, but oh well.
15 year old, David living in the year 2000, travels back in time to 1964 and kills his own grandfather. During the trail of events, neither his father or himself will be born, however, then he would not have been alive to travel back in time and kill his grandfather, but, then his grandfather would not have died and David himself would have lived.
We could easily find a way to go back in time.. <--- ...
You could go back and kill yourself. Then your old self would be dead and your young self still in the past would die.
Merciless, the time machine is in the year 1900 because it travelled in time with you. Well, unless it's one of the 'standard' physical time machines, which have this annoying tendency to not let you go back further then the creation of the machine.

Of course, that solves the cumulative audience problem.

Anyway, Dixon, the general solution to paradoxes like this is to suggest that it can't happen - physics intervenes and somehow prevents you killing yourself. Or you actually cause yourself to go back in time and try to kill yourself by trying to kill yourself - these are called 'bootstrap paradoxes', but they're not actually paradoxical, interestingly enough.

Some physics has been done with a less violent version of the same idea - a billiard ball rolling through a time machine of some description and coming out in such a way that it runs into itself in the past and prevents itself from going through the machine. Every possible solution to the mechanics of that problem is a bootstrap paradox - the angle the ball must go along in order to go through the time machine results in it knocking itself through when it pops out.
Do (not) read in the parenthesis.
If you traveled back in time, the time machine would go with you. Also, from all i know, i havent seen anyone from the future comming by here. Which means, probobly that a time machine will never be created in the future.
Knifo, depends on the time machine. Most of the ones we know of don't. For example, the standard take-a-wormhole-and-use-time-dilation-to-make-one-end-younge r machine doesn't go back in time - you can't go back further then the initial creation of the wormhole.

Which means, probobly that a time machine will never be created in the future.

I disagree, for the above reason - Time machines that can't go back beyond their creation are plausible. What you've just stated, in a modified form, is called the 'cumulative audience paradox' - look it up.
Well, you never know..why can't you? What if your sitting in a time machine with another person, and he hits 1940. And you were born in 1980..Then what?