The term bootstrap paradox comes from the title of the story and the idiom pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, a nod to a future version of oneself influencing the life of a past version. As the idiom originally observes, it’s impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps—unless you’re a time traveler.

One oxymoron example is “deafening silence,” which describes a silence that is so overpowering it almost feels deafening, or extremely loud—just as an actual sound would. Oxymorons are often used in everyday conversation and in a breadth of writing, such as literature, poetry, and songwriting.

Here are our top 36 favorite oxymorons – oxymorons in a loose sense of the word:

• open secret. act naturally. found missing.
• larger half. alone together. liquid gas.
• clearly confused. Hell’s Angels.
• 100% chance. absolutely unsure.
• curved line. daily special.
• growing smaller. half dead.
• mutual differences. natural artifact.

Soundless rage is not an oxymoron then, as soundless is an antonym to loudness, not rage. Rage can be silent or loud. Therefore, choice (A) is incorrect. words that contradict each other yet form a cohesive phrase.

No, the term least favorite is not an oxymoron. A true oxymoron has two contradictory or opposite words together. The term least favorite describes an ordered position in a list. There is no contradiction, and no oxymoron.

A lot of science fiction, at least, would disagree with you. The ending of Interstellar seems to present a “bootstrap paradox.” In short, this is a type of time paradox in which a chicken sends an egg back in time, which egg then becomes that chicken.

The chicken or the egg causality dilemma is commonly stated as the question, “which came first: the chicken or the egg?” The dilemma stems from the observation that all chickens hatch from eggs and all chicken eggs are laid by chickens.

bootstrap paradox

For the most part, any paradox related to time travel can generally be resolved or avoided by the Novikov self-consistency principle, which essentially asserts that for any scenario in which a paradox might arise, the probability of that event actually occurring is zero — or, to quote from LOST, “whatever happened.

For decades, physicists have been studying and debating versions of this paradox: If we could travel back in time and change the past, what would happen to the future? A new study offers a potential answer: Nothing. Put simply: It’s theoretically possible to go back in time, but you couldn’t change history.

Surprisingly, yes. At the level of quantum particles (we are talking individual photons, elementary particles or individual atoms), there is something called Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiments that show that actions in the present can influence the past.

General relativity also provides scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA. The equations, however, might be difficult to physically achieve. One possibility could be to go faster than light, which travels at 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) in a vacuum.

This version, posted at arXiv.org, is called a post-selected model. By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence.