• Question: What's your favourite paradox and why?

    Asked by atomicalex to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 18 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      Schrödingers cat as it explains the bizarre particle and wave nature of the small quantum world, and also involves possibly killing a cat 😉

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      I always love the time travel paradoxes, and the massive amount of effort that so many Scifi films and TV shoes go to to either try not to cause them, or to openly mock the fact that they cant.

      An excellent example of this is the really low budget but superb film primer
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2011:

      I’d say Olbers’ Paradox, because it starts with the simplest of questions – why is the night sky dark? There’s evidence that mankind has been puzzling over this question for 400 years. If the universe is infinite – so with stars scattered through an infinite space – then the sky would be flooded with light and it wouldn’t matter if you were on the side of the earth facing towards or away from the sun. It wouldn’t get dark at night. So in short, it must lead you to conclude that the universe is finite in age, which ties back in to the Big Bang theory. I love the way that such a seemingly simple question takes you to some really fundamental aspects of cosmology and where we all came from.

    • Photo: Peter Williams

      Peter Williams answered on 18 Nov 2011:

      Why, no matter how many socks i buy, can i only find odd ones?

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 18 Nov 2011:

      Not really a science paradox, more a maths thing, but I’d go with Russell’s Paradox. It was great, because resolving it led to a lot of development in mathematics. I think that’s the mark of a good paradox – that to figure it out you really have to rethink the basics.

      Russell’s paradox is roughly this: imagine a town with a barber who shaves all of the people that don’t shave themselves, and only those people (that it, he doesn’t shave anyone who _does_ shave themselves).

      The question is, does the barber shave himself?

      If he does, then he’s a person that does shave, so he shouldn’t be shaving himself (because he’s the barber that only shaves people that _don’t_ shave themselves).

      And if he doesn’t then he should shave himself (because he’s the barber that shaves all of the people that don’t shave themselves).

      So, either way, he’s in a pickle.

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