Paradoxes

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Originally Posted by udsuna

What people fail to realize is that an omnipotent being could alter the nature of the universe as to allow such an affront to its omnipotence. Therefor, an omnipotent being could easily alter the laws of the universe so that said rock is at times too heavy, and at times not.


What is a more interesting paradox is the question of whether or not "God" could break his own promise. An omnipotent creator's word is inviolate, so if God promises that he won't do something, then it automatically becomes impossible for Him to do it. He can either break his own law, and thus disprove infallibility, or obey his words, and thus be incapable of a certain action.

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God could simply change his mind... in Christianity, God had several major policy changes, based on events that happened on Earth. In Old Testament days, death and slaughter were rife. The wicked were hewn by the wrath of the Creator. But after the New Testament, causing the deaths of others became frowned upon. God, as a sentient being, would be fully capable of changing his mind about something he'd promised to do; though I doubt it'd be a decision that would be made lightly.

Ah, but he CAN'T change his mind, because he's INFALLIBLE. If he would later change his mind, he'd know it ahead of time, and thus not need to. A perfect being cannot change without losing it's perfection. So, in all those biblical developements, god didn't change his mind, just his current policy. He knew he'd change it in the future, of course, but for the time being it's what he deemed for the situation.

Just like I could decide that I want stake for dinner, yet know that tommorrow I'm going to want chicken instead. If I was all-knowing, then I'd happily eat my steak and then later just as happily eat my chicken. I didn't change, the environment around me did.

See, this is why time travel, in all it's current impossibility - should never happen! You just know that as soon as you make a time machine, some idiot is gonna go back in time, push himself off a cliff and then the time/space continuum will explode! (due to the fact that once you're dead, you can't push yourself off the cliff... but then you won't be dead, etc)

I am going to EXPLODE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fletcher's paradox is also known as Xeno's paradox, but rephrased into a race between achillies and a tortise, with the tortise given a head start. It was considered unsolvable by the greeks, and wasn't solved till they invented stuff like calculumus, when you could prove that an infinite series has a finite sum.

Say there is a barn 10 m tall you wish to pole vault over with a 12 m pole. You charge the barn at 0.6c. Do you see where this is going? :p

The grandfather paradox works like Endless described it. You cannot possibly go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you would have never existed in the present day to go back in time to kill your grandfather. Time travel is a tricky business. Like, you can go back in time only as far back as the time machine existed before it becomes uninvented.

Presumably, time travel couldn't happen *unless* it was necessary to cause the future to occur in such a way as to cause that time-loop. Any deviation from this course of inevitability would simply make the time-traveler cease to exist. Like being dead, only without the body.

Could go the other way too. You go forward in time and see yourself doing what you're doing, you suddenly have the choice to not do what you saw yourself doing thus what you saw isn't really what happened. Of course the future is always undefined so travelling forward in time in a silly concept in the first place. So this post is a silly thing and quite unnecessary. Of course, haveing travelled ten minutes into the future I knew this, but I had to do it anyway to aviod causeing a paradox. Are you with me?

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Originally Posted by -N-

Say there is a barn 10 m tall you wish to pole vault over with a 12 m pole. You charge the barn at 0.6c. Do you see where this is going? :p

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The pole breaks. :p

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Originally Posted by o_O

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Originally Posted by -N-

Say there is a barn 10 m tall you wish to pole vault over with a 12 m pole. You charge the barn at 0.6c. Do you see where this is going? :p

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The pole breaks. :p

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Doofus. :p

The pole contracts to 9.6 m due to length contraction. However, since you'd be in an accelerating frame of reference while vaulting (due to circular motion and momentum shift), you'd probably be fine due to some GR crap I don't know. That's how my SR prof explained it - superiorist punk. :p