Posted in Philosophy

Epimenides Paradox

A Cretan named Epimenides once said: “All Cretans are liars.”
So if Epimenides is a Cretan and he is a liar, then the statement is false. But that means that Cretans tell the truth, and Cretans are in fact liars. So what is the truth? This paradox continues ad infinitum due to the self-referencing nature of the statement.

This is a well-known example of a logical fallacy, or a flaw in a logic. It is also referred to as the Liar Paradox, seen in: “This sentence is false”.
The power of a paradox is best portrayed in the following parable.

A wise woman who worked as a fortune teller was tried for being a witch. In her trial, the king demanded she tell a fortune. If the fortune was correct, she would be drowned. If the fortune was wrong, she would be burnt at the stake. The woman smiled, and replied: “I will be burnt at the stake”.

Posted in Science & Nature

Urban Paradox

A few years ago, a theoretical physicist studied population growth in cities to find the mechanism of how cities operate. What he found was an astonishing law.
Wherever the city, as the population doubled in size, the average income, number of patents, number of educational and research facilities and other important numbers all increased around 15 percent. Although it is normal for such statistics to increase as a city grows, it is interesting to see that almost all of them increasing at a similar rate, despite being so different sometimes.
More fascinating is the fact that not only do the above “good” statistics increase equally, but so do crime rates, pollution, smog occurrence, stomach flu and AIDS prevalence all increase approximately 15 percent.
Therefore, a city can be seen as a double-edge sword that is both the source of fast growth, wealth and ideas, but also waste, pollution, stress and disease.

Biologically speaking, an organism has a tendency to have slower growth and pace of life as it gets larger. For instance, an elephant’s heart beats slower than a mouse, and its cells do less work on average too. However, a city exhibits a snowball effect where it grows faster as it gets larger. To achieve this extremely high rate of growth, it must consume an immense amount of resources, which ultimately ends up as large quantities of waste and pollution. Also, as people get busier, the overall “quality” of the society falls, leading to increased stress and disease prevalence.

If so, should we abandon our current productivity and live a slow, village life and ignore our potential as a species? Or should we continue our exponential growth at the cost of using up nature’s well-maintained resources like no tomorrow?

Posted in Science & Nature

Mobius Strip

A piece of paper has two sides. However, a Möbius strip has only one side. Ergo, if you walk on a Möbius strip, you walk on both sides and end up on the opposite side on the same location you started at in one trip. Because it has one side, it also has one boundary. This means that if you cut a Möbius strip along its length, you end up with not two rings, but one thinner, longer loop with an extra twist.

A similar structure is the Klein bottle. This structure is a self-paradoxical, single curvature, as its opening meets with its base, making the inside and outside indistinguishable. The entry is the exit, the inside is the outside, and the top is the bottom.

Our universe might be such a space where there is no distinction between the beginning and the end.