What is the solution to Grandpa Paradox?
Because this is the most basic paradox about time travel, I have labelled it as number 0.
As we all know that paradoxes don't have an answer but just couple amount of possibilities. However, the grandfather or the grandpa paradox is one that successfully explains that how the concept of time travel is complicated enough on its own without the likelihood of killing an important relative and negating your own existence.
This potential logical problem would arise if a person were to travel to a past time. The name comes from the idea that if a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him, it would make their own birth impossible. So, if time travel is possible, it somehow must avoid such a contradiction.
So then? How is it possible and what is it solution for this? Okay, don't try to answer that yourself, I am there to help!
The first answer to this famous paradox is that when you go back in time to kill your grandfather, you're not going back to your own history, but a copy of your history, and everything you do in this version of your history will affect the alternate future of that universe, not your own.
However, this solution tries to bypass the paradox and not actually solve it. So there's another try...
This solution is totally against the paradox. Basically, if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, you don't exist, so your grandfather can't be killed. So there are two realities happening in parallel here. While all of this is 100 percent hypothetical, because no one's actually gone back in time to test this out, we do have evidence of two separate realities happening in parallel.
But if you apply this kind of thinking to the grandfather paradox, you get something called a closed time loop, where your grandfather is simultaneously dead and alive, and so are you as a result.
Even for time lords who aren't particularly interested in testing the limits of their own mortality by offing their teenage grandpa, things don't look great.
So, I suppose that this continues to remain a paradox as we aren't unable to answer it. But one day, for sure, when we will be able to time travel, we will slowly unfold these secrets as well.
I would love to hear from you what do you think about this paradox and it's solution in the comments section below...
Posts before October 2021 have been marked as "Old Posts". Less likely, but they might have out dated or incorrect information, ugly looking bits of code, no labels, etc. Don't get me wrong, many of these posts are top-notch and interesting too.
I thought it would be better not to delete or revamp these posts, even if they suck. The bitter truth is that old works always suck, but I take that as a positive tool to convey that I am growing. Besides there's no better way to showcase my journey without these old, messy, poorly written posts!
I thought it would be better not to delete or revamp these posts, even if they suck. The bitter truth is that old works always suck, but I take that as a positive tool to convey that I am growing. Besides there's no better way to showcase my journey without these old, messy, poorly written posts!
Old Post