Vicious Circles and Infinity, Patrick Hughes and George Brecht’s 1978 anthology of paradoxes, begins with this sentence:
“The anthology has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind.”
Oddities
Bhartrhari’s Paradox
There are some things that are unnameable. But it seems impossible to verify this by giving positive instances, because this would require us to name that which we have declared to be unnameable.
From an observation by the fifth-century Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhartrhari. “[E]very argument advanced to support any instance of the unnameability thesis drives one still more firmly into the paradox,” note philosophers Hans and Radhika Herzberger, “for they naturally tend to involve repeated reference to the very things whose unnameability they undertake to establish.”
(Hans G. Herzberger and Radhika Herzberger, “Bhartrhari’s Paradox,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 9:1 [March 1981], 1-17.)
Taking Pause
‘Theft’ is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of ‘rightfully owned property’ — and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as ‘theft.’ Thus, the statement ‘All property is theft’ has an internal contradiction: to use the concept ‘theft’ while denying the validity of the concept of ‘property,’ is to use ‘theft’ as a concept to which one has no logical right — that is, as a stolen concept.
— Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963
Polchinski’s Paradox
In 1990, physicist Joseph Polchinski described a puzzling situation: Suppose a billiard ball were sent through a traversable wormhole into the past, where it knocked its earlier self off course, away from the wormhole. This is a version of the famous grandfather paradox: How can we explain the ball’s presence where it seems to have prevented its own arrival?
Fortunately, Caltech students Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer found that self-consistent solutions exist in which the older ball imparts only a glancing blow to its younger self, one that sends it through the hole at just the right angle to deliver a similarly glancing blow to its own forebear, and so on, sparing us from the paradox. (In 1991 the students and Kip Thorne reported that they’d failed to find any initial conditions in which such self-consistent solutions were unavailable, so it’s plausible that they exist for every possible initial trajectory. But this hasn’t been proven.)
Another pleasing possibility is that the older ball knocks the younger out of the way and itself enters the wormhole again. This creates an infinite loop, and some existential bewilderment, but no paradox.
Postal Inspector
In 1897, to help inaugurate New York City’s new pneumatic mail system, officials sent a live black cat in a canister from the Produce Exchange Post Office on Bowling Green to the General Post Office on Park Row, a distance of 3,750 feet.
“How it could live after being shot at terrific speed from Station P in the Produce Exchange Building, making several turns before reaching Broadway and Park Row, I cannot conceive, but it did,” recalled postal supervisor Howard Wallace Connelly. “It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose.”
At its peak the system would carry 95,000 letters a day through 27 miles of tubes connecting 23 post offices. It was discontinued in 1953, outmoded by the growing volume of mail and the advent of the automobile.
Nothing Doing
Recess, County Galway, Ireland:
Aspelt, Luxembourg:
Bechyne, Czech Republic:
(“In this house, no important person was born, lived, and most importantly did not die, and that is why we live well here.”)
Záblatí-Hlásná Lhota, Czech Republic:
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(“Hlásná Lhota – a stone in whose surroundings nothing significant has demonstrably happened for several hundred years”)
Míšov, Czech Republic:
(“On 8 May 1915 in Míšov, the great Czech genius Jára Cimrman just barely missed being involved in something historically important.”)
O’Hungry’s Café, Old Town San Diego State Historic Park:
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York, Western Australia:
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Villa de Leyva, Boyacá Department, Colombia:
(“On October 13, 1825, nothing happened in this house, nor was anyone important born.”)
Changed Men
Iranian hermit Amou Haji ate carrion, drank from puddles, lived in a hole, smoked dung, and died at 94, a few months after bathing for the first time in 60 years. He said he became a hermit due to “emotional setbacks” after a heartbreak.
English merchant Nathaniel Bentley became known as Dirty Dick when he stopped washing in his late 30s. His filthy shop became a tourist attraction. Interestingly, he too was said to have changed after a ruined love affair, allegedly after his fiancée died on the eve of their wedding. Charles Dickens knew of the story, which may have inspired that of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.
The Same Boat
The Wikipedia article on the Ship of Theseus has changed entirely since its inception.
Casting Call
I turn off the light when I leave the room and I turn it on again when I come back in a moment later. Is the shadow of the statue on the table the same one before and after the light is off? If we say it’s the same, then we accept the existence of strange, intermittent entities (in the same family as the flashing of the turn-signal light on a car). If we don’t like that idea, then we have to say that there are two different things: the shadow that was present before I turned off the light and the shadow present after I turn it on again. What’s different about them?
— Roberto Casati, The Shadow Club, 2003
(We might distinguish the two by observing that different photons are hitting the statue, but this seems to mean that a new shadow is produced every instant, and that doesn’t sound right either.)
In Other News
This monster was found in the kingdom of Santa Fe, Peru, in the province of Chili and in the Lake of Fagua, located in the lands of Prosper Voston. It emerged during the night in order to devour the swine, cows and bulls of the area. Its length is eleven feet; its face is roughly that of a man; its mouth is as wide as its face; it is provided with teeth two inches long; it has twenty-four-inch horns like those of a bull; its hair reaches to the ground; it has four-inch ears like those of an ass; it has two batlike wings; its thighs and legs are twenty-five inches long and its claws eight; it has two tails, one very flexible and provided with rings that help it seize its prey, and the other ending in a dart which helps it kill; its entire body is covered with scales. The monster was captured by many men who had laid traps into which it fell. It was entangled in nets and brought alive to the viceroy, who succeeded in nourishing it with a steer, a cow, a bull, given to it every day with three or four swine, to which it is quite partial. As it would be necessary to load too great a quantity of cattle to nourish it during the crossing, which takes at least five or six months to pass Cape Horn, the viceroy has sent orders along the entire land route to provide for the needs of this unique monster while making it march by stages to the Gulf of Honduras, where it will embark for Havana. From there to the Bermudas, to the Azores, and in three weeks it will disembark at Cadiz. From Cadiz it will be taken by short trips to the royal family. It is hoped that the female will be captured so that the species will not die out in Europe. The species seems to be that of harpies, heretofore considered legendary.
— Courier de L’Europe, Oct. 22 and 29, 1784
(Another hoax, but a widely credited one. From the Bibliothèque Nationale: “This monster frequently emerged from Lake Fagua at night to devour pigs, cows and bulls. It has even been caught using nets; but needs feeding daily with an ox, cow or bull and three or four pigs.”)