02 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 Ontological paradox

Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his role in creating history, not changing it. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can. This theory, however, only makes sen...
  1  notes

A paradox of time-travel. If a person takes information back in time and gives it to someone, who becomes the originator of that information, then where did the information originate?

13 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Everyone Believes and Experiment Except the Experimentor

No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment. For this reason the discoverer of a new fact seldom feels quite so confident of it as others do. On the other hand other people are usually critical of an hypothesis, whereas the originator identifies himself with it and is l...
  1  notes

Because the experimentor knows all the ways the experiment could have gone wrong. Conversely, no one believes and hypothesis except its originator.