Posts Tagged ‘paradox’
“The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”*…

AFP PHOTO / TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images
“The past is obdurate,” Stephen King wrote in his book about a man who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. “It doesn’t want to be changed.”
Turns out, King might have been onto something.
Countless science fiction tales have explored the paradox of what would happen if you do something in the past that endangers the future. Perhaps one of the most famous pop culture examples is Back to the Future, when Marty McFly went back in time and accidentally stopped his parents from meeting, putting his own existence in jeopardy.
But maybe McFly wasn’t in much danger after all. According a new paper from researchers at the University of Queensland, even if time travel were possible, the paradox couldn’t actually exist…
Find out why: “Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say.“
* Albert Einstein
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As we ponder predestination, we might send cosmological birthday greetings to Enrico Fermi; he was born on this date in 1901. A physicist who is best remembered for (literally) presiding over the birth of the Atomic Age, he was also remarkable as the last “double-threat” in his field: a genius at creating both important theories and elegant experiments. As recently observed, the division of labor between theorists and experimentalists has since been pretty complete.
The novelist and historian of science C. P. Snow wrote that “if Fermi had been born a few years earlier, one could well imagine him discovering Rutherford’s atomic nucleus, and then developing Bohr’s theory of the hydrogen atom. If this sounds like hyperbole, anything about Fermi is likely to sound like hyperbole.”

“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, “I wish I had known this some time ago”*…
“Irony” is a term that everyone uses and seems to understand. It is also a concept that is notoriously difficult to define. Much like Winona Ryder’s character in the 1994 rom-com “Reality Bites,” whose inability to describe irony costs her a job interview, we know it when we see it, but nonetheless have trouble articulating it. Even worse, it seems as if the same term is used to describe very different things. And following your mother’s advice — to look it up in the dictionary — is liable to leave you even more confused than before.
Uncertainty about irony can be found almost everywhere. An American president posts a tweet containing the phrase “Isn’t it ironic?” and is derided for misusing the term. A North Korean dictator bans sarcasm directed at him and his regime because he fears that people are only agreeing with him ironically. A song about irony is mocked because its lyrics contain non-ironic examples. The term has been applied to a number of different phenomena over time, and as a label, it has been stretched to accommodate a number of new senses. But exactly how does irony differ from related concepts like coincidence, paradox, satire, and parody?…
A handy guide to distinguishing the notoriously slippery concept of irony from its distant cousins coincidence, satire, parody, and paradox: “What Irony is Not,” excerpted from Irony and Sarcasm, by Roger Kreuz.
* Sign of the Unicorn
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As we choose our words, we might recall that it was on this date in 1483 that Pope Sixtus IV consecrated the Sistine Chapel (which takes its name from his) in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. Originally known as the Cappella Magna (Great Chapel), Sixtus had renovated it, enlisting a team of Renaissance painters that included Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli to create a series of frescos depicting the Life of Moses and the Life of Christ, offset by papal portraits above and trompe-l’œil drapery below. Michelangelo’s famous ceiling was painted from 1508 to 1512; and his equally-remarkable altarpiece, The Last Judgement, from 1536 to 1541.
“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress”*…
Consider the simple function Y=1/X:
Take one half and rotate it around X.
It creates the shape you see at the top of this post, known as “Torricelli’s Trumpet” for its discoverer, the 17th century mathematician Evangelista Torricelli. It’s noteworthy for its peculiar topographical qualities: while both the volume and the surface area can be calculated, and the volume is a finite number, the surface area is Infinite. That’s to say that, while one can fill that three dimensional shape with a calculable quantity of paint, one cannot coat the exterior surface, as it would require an infinite amount of paint… (Supporting math, here.)
(The figure is also known as “Gabriel’s Horn,” a reference to the Archangel Gabriel, who blows his horn to announce Judgment Day– an association of the divine, or infinite, with the finite.)
This contribution (from Pablo Ramos) is just one of the fascinating answers to the question of Quora: “What are the weirdest science paradoxes that are mathematically true but counter-intuitive?“
* Niels Bohr
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As we rotate our minds around x, we might send post-industrial birthday greetings to Daniel Bell; he was born on this date in 1919. Bell spent the first twenty years of his adult life as a journalist, exploring sociological issues; in 1960, on the strength of a book he’d written– The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties— he was awarded a PhD by Columbia University, where he taught briefly before moving for the rest of his career to Harvard. One of the leading intellectuals of the Post-War era, Bell is best known for his contributions to the study of “post-industrialism,” and for his acute unpacking of the interactions among science, technology and politics.
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