5 Mind-Bending Paradoxes Explained

when a statement seems contradictory a situation impossible or a scene so puzzling we can't wrap our minds around it we call it a paradx there are all sorts of paradoxes including unsolved problems in biology confusing Concepts in relativity mathematics logic and much more well today we're going to go over some of the most popular paradoxes out there and break down exactly what makes them so [Music] perplexing [Music] imagine you walk into your local library looking for an interesting story to read after scanning the shelves for a bit you pull out a copy of the book Lord of the Rings by JRR talken lost in his fantasy world for some reason you decide that this is the best book that you've ever read and you now have a burning desire to personally thank toen for his works unfortunately he died in 1973 so you head home and you do what any determined fan would do you build a time machine in your garage and you travel back to the 1920s where you find toen in his 30s you spend several hours gushing about your favorite characters moments and battles from his book and then you ask him to autograph it but talken he's a bit flustered he has no idea what you're talking about because he's not going to publish that book for another 15 years and hasn't even started writing it yet finally you decid it's time to go home but as you're stepping into your time machine and warping Back to the Future you realize they accidentally left your book until token's house leaving it in the possession of its author what happens here is that Tolen inspired by your words of praise and finding the copy of the book that you left behind decides to claim it as his own and publishes it as Lord of the Rings it becomes a historic novel eventually ending up in your local library where you pick it up fall in love with it and head back in time to give it to talking now on the surface this might seem fine but it begs the question where did the book come from in the first place it can't have originally come from talking because he got the idea from you when you're traveled back in time and gave it to him and it didn't come from you because you got the idea from talking when you found the book in the library and this is the Paradox the book exists in a Time loop with no beginning cause and effect has been broken because time travel has allowed the effect to become its own cause if it still doesn't make sense to you there's a couple more examples an episode of Doctor Who describes a situation in which a man goes back in time with some of Beethoven's music but upon finding that Beethoven doesn't exist he decides to be come Beethoven and publishes the music himself not only does this leave the origin of the music up in the air but even the name Beethoven seemingly has no origin and finally in the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time the character played by Christopher reev is given a pocket watch by an elderly lady later in the movie he travels back in time and meets this lady in her youth where he gifts her the pocket watch so according to the woman the man traveled back in time and gave her the watch which is why she gave it back to him in later life but according to the man the woman gave him the watch first which is why he went back in time to give it to her following the trail of the watch's origin you end up stuck in a loop with no beginning let me take a moment just before we continue with today's video to talk about something that has transformed the ordinary and turned it into the extraordinary if you've been following this channel for a while you know that I've talked about the ridge wallet previously got one of those here this is my burn titanium wallet with my cards inside but I'm not here to tell you about that today instead I'm here to tell you about their latest thing and that is the ridge beveled ring set I'm wearing one of these right now the ridge beveled ring collection is not your typical jewelry it's packed with fantastic features you get to choose from 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Sid projects and use the promo code Sid projects thanks to Ridge for the sponsorship and now back to today's video all right our next Paradox comes from the world of mathematics and highlights the inability of the human mind to easily comprehend Infinity Hilbert's experiment of the Grand Hotel is a thought experiment that imagines a gargantuan Hotel it's so big that it has not just a few thousand rooms not even a few million rooms but an infinite number of rooms stranger still every room is occupied by a single person meaning if you randomly select any number that room room is taken all the way from room number seven to room number 400,000 to room number six ooc illian no matter how high you go they are always occupied but you really want to stay in the hotel so you come up with an idea to make some space for yourself every occupant simply needs to move up one room meaning the person in room one moves to room two the person in room two moves to room three and so on all the way up the chain this leaves room one vacant and you can now take it for yourself this method works for any number of finite guests guests bringing in 10 new guests simply means that everyone needs to move up 10 rooms bring in 50 and everyone needs to move up 50 rooms no matter the number you can always find room it's a strange idea that because Infinity does not behave like the numbers we encounter in our daily lives even when it's full you can still make space in it but it does get even weirder not only can you fit any number of finite guests into the hotel but even an infinite amount if an infinite amount of people show up looking for a room doubling each room number always always ends up in an even number leaving every single odd-numbered room vacant and the infinite number of guests can settle in the night in rooms 1 3 5 7 Etc now imagine the hotel is on the beach and an infinite number of berries arrive each carrying an infinite number of cars each carrying an infinite number of people the maths gets pretty crazy but you don't need to understand the maths to get what this Paradox is about the reason hubbert's hotel is a paradox is because it leads to a result that is counterintuitive yet certainly and provably true our instinct tells us that when a hotel is full it is full and that is the end of the story but when working with infinity things are never quite so [Music] simple our next Paradox is a bit of a classic first recorded by Greek historian Plutarch nearly 2,000 years ago in his biography life of Theus The Story Goes as follows a ship carrying the legendary hero Theus sailed from Athens to cre and because Theus was such an important figure the ship was preserved for many generations and over the years as old planks began to crack and rot they were replaced with new ones likewise the Aging sails were eventually replaced with newer fabric as were the ORS the Rudders and everything else after all these years of Renovations it was realized that not a single piece remained from the original ship every last bit had been replaced with something newer so then the big question is is this still the ship of Theus or is it an entirely new ship if you take the side that it's an entirely new ship it only leads to more questions it's unclear when this transition happened because presumably at some point in the renovations it was still the original ship and only after a certain number of Parts have been replaced did it become something completely new but how many parts surely not just one but where do you draw the line maybe once you pass 50% maybe 75 there's no definitive answer here but here's where it gets even trickier what if someone had secretly been saving all all of the discarded parts from the original ship all the old planks the decaying sails and splitting masts and once they had every single piece reconstructed The Old Ship with the original parts sitting side by side with the one that had been renovated over the years they both could lay claim to being the actual ship of Theus one ship claims this through continuity and the other through originality this is the Paradox it's a paradox of identity whichever ship you believe to be the actual ship of thesis largely comes down to your own opinion and several so-called Solutions have been thought up over the years but none of them can really quite nail it down these Concepts might sound abstract and a bit detached from reality so let's make it personal shall we throughout your life your cells are dividing and dying off in fact every day more than 50 billion cells die in your body constantly being replaced in a fine-tuned biological process because some cells live longer than others it's estimated that all of our body cells are replaced every 7 to 10 years so at what point do you consider your body to be entirely new okay imagine there's a big lottery in town with a single guaranteed winner and you just can't resist buying a ticket not because you're addicted to gambl you can quit whenever you want but because you can't stop thinking about becoming that soulle winner and buying that super yacht that you've always wanted after heading home you turn on the TV and see the devastating news that exactly 1 Million lottery tickets have been so so you stare at the one in your hand and realize that you essentially have no chance of winning and you throw it away after all there's a million other tickets and it's very reasonable to assume that yours is losing hence why gambling is a losing game in the first place after talking to your friend you explain your logic to him and he also throws out his ticket realizing that he too has no real chance of winning and the ticket was nothing more than a waste of money this is a perfectly logical thought as 999,999 out of a million is well beyond the threshold called to consider something a certainty therefore it's reasonable to assume that ticket number one is losing and it's also reasonable to assume that ticket number two is losing this logic follows all the way through to the 1 millionth ticket and applying the same logic across the board it has now become reasonable to assume that not a single ticket will win but this can't be because you know that one ticket will win and this is where the Paradox arises in these contradictory yet seemingly true statements you have one rational line of thought telling you that you are completely justified by your natural intuition in saying that every ticket will lose while another rational line of thought tells you that one of them must be winning to some this doesn't seem like a paradox after all it's just a matter of probability but to philosophers this isn't a purely mathematical Paradox like Hilbert's Hotel was this is a paradox of rational human thoughts at what point do we draw the line between being justified and something being a certainty while it is still technically possible and how can this rational logic lead to two completely true yet contradictory statements this puzzle was first put forward in the 1960s and its underlying logic has been grappled with ever since with many solutions having been put forward such as restricting the logic to find the difference between something being highly probable and something being absolutely certain to cognitive scientists it seems to be a problem of information aggregation or how we combine results from different lines of thought regardless much like the other paradoxes this is a level of logic that doesn't affect one's day-to-day life and even figuring out solutions to it does not influence anyone's decisionmaking when it comes to gambling and this is considered by some to be the second Lottery Paradox what compels people to engage in an event when the odds are so astronomically stacked against them that they know they have next to no chance of winning so for our last Paradox today we're going to dive into the one that you've most certainly heard of before perhaps the most popular time travel problem that's ever been thought up so let's start with the basics you build a time machine and you travel back many decades encountering your own grandfather while he was still in his youth for whatever reason you end up taking his life meaning that he doesn't ever meet your grandmother and never has kids with her leading to you never being born if you are never born then nobody goes back in time to eliminate your grandfather meaning he continues his life as normal meets your grandmother and the two raise a girl who ends up giving birth to you and now you exist you could go back into time and kill your grandfather starting the whole cycle again it's an utterly confusing mess and it has left everyone scratching their heads for years it's relative Simplicity yet far-reaching consequences a part of why it has become so popular and there's quite a bit to unpack here one solution to the Paradox arises from quantum mechanics specifically the many world's interpretation this Theory suggests that when an event can happen one of two ways say you either kill your grandfather or you don't both options actually happen branching off into multiple universes or timelines this solves the issue of you not being born because the universe in which you kill your grandfather is not the one in which you will eventually created by the way this Theory also seems to fix the bootstrap Paradox mentioned at the beginning of the video because it means that the object's time Loop actually begins in a separate universe but this idea leaves so much to be explained with these alleged alternate universes that there's really just more questions than answers another solution comes from what is known as the novakov self-consistency principle a conjecture put forward by a Russian physicist proposing that the Universe outright prevents any action that would create contradictions or paradoxes if this is true it could mean that the laws of the universe do not allow time travel to the Past in any form or it may mean that all we can do is observe the past without interfering the most concerning implication of this though is that it may indeed allow us to travel to the past but anything we do only serves to preserve the timeline as it was meaning that all along our past actions only contributed to the current state of the world but simply you can indeed time travel backwards but nothing you do matters as you cannot change the future if this is true it brings into question the notion of free will because it appears that our actions are already predetermined to preserve the timeline and so perhaps the simplest explanation is the most boring one that time travel to the Past simply isn't possible and we'll never need to deal with the potential consequences of such an [Music] invention [Music]

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 755,947

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects, sideprojects

Id: uGQm8YykPIs

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 24 2023