eli5: What is the bootstrap Paradox?
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Did you ever see Back to the Future ? Who “wrote” Johnny B. Goode in that ? Chuck Berry player it, and Marty learned it from him. But Berry only learned it from Marty.
It’s a paradox specifically related to time travel shenanigans.
It come from the impossibility of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps. Either I can pull up my bootstraps or i can be pulled up by my bootstraps, but I can’t do both.
Bootstraps means shoelaces here.
In legend of zelda, ocarina of time, you play in 2 separate time periods. as an adult, you learn the song of storms from an npc. you then go back in time to when you were a kid, and teach it to that npc as a kid. that npc then teaches it to you as an adult. who wrote the song originally? it exists only within the bootstrap paradox.
“Wait a moment. Where did you get that peach?”
‘Someone threw it at you earlier.”
“But that someone was me.”
“I know.”
“But where did I get it?”
‘From me.”
“Yes, but where did you get it?”
“Someone threw it at you earlier.”
“But that someone was me!”
“I know!”
“But where did I get it?”
“From me!”
“Yes, but where did you get it?”
“Someone threw it at you earlier!”
“BUT THAT SOME-”
Basically, assuming a stable time loop, a bootstrap paradox is when something exists due to someone learning/gaining something, then going back in time and giving that something to the person they originally got it from. But because of this, there is no real point of orgin.
In addition to the time travel answer, it also has practical answers.
A PC, when you first start it, doesn’t know how to read instructions, because it can’t read the instructions on how to read instructions. It’s like if someone handed a child a book on “how to read”, the child would be like “???”. Just like you can’t pull yourself up on your own boot straps to fly, you can’t teach yourself knowledge you don’t have.
That’s why we have the Bootloader. It *forces* some basic knowledge into the PC after it has been *booted* up, so it can read the rest of it’s instructions. It “bootstraps” the PC, which is also the origin of the phrase “to boot a PC”.
Something in a time travel story that exists within a loop but has no apparent origin.
In the movie *Somewhere in Time* Chritopher Reeve plays a writer who receives a pocket watch from an old woman who acts as if she knows him. She dies shortly after. Turns out she was an actress decades ago and he ends up traveling back in time, bringing the pocket watch with him, and having a romance with her in the past. He ends up getting yanked back to the present unintentionally. When this happens he leaves the watch behind that she then keeps as a momento until eventually giving it to him in the beginning of the movie.
So where did the watch come from originally? It appears to be from her time period, but she didn’t buy it at a store. She got it from him when he traveled to the past. He only had it because he got it from her in the present at the beginning. The watch’s very existence seem to be pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. Who made it? When? There doesn’t seem to be any source for its origin but yet it’s there. Bootstrap paradox.
Would this apply to the moment when Kyle Reese teaches Sarah Connor how to make explosives?
Sarah Connor: [checks the grocery bags Kyle has brought back to the hotel room] What’ve we got? Moth balls, corn syrup, ammonia. What’s for dinner?
Kyle Reese: Plastique.
Sarah Connor: That sounds good. What is it?
Kyle Reese: Nitroglycerine-base; it’s a bit more stable. I learned to make it when I was a kid.
Lots of good explanation here. My favorite example is bill and ted’s excellent adventure.
“If you’re really us, what number are thinking of?”
“69 dude!”
“Woah”
Obviously this has been explained a lot here but for physicists the very existence of paradoxes generally means one of two things:
1) Time travel to the past is impossible due to the existence of said paradoxes
2) Time travel creates split timelines (essentially a multi-verse theory)
How about simply chicken and egg?
Will that qualify? Or must be time travel
Say a wizard is going to be ripped apart by a werewolf, but the werewolf is called off howling by the same wizard that went back in time to save himself. How can the wizard live into the future to save himself if he’d be eaten in the first place? Paradox.
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