# Temporal paradox A temporal paradox is a contradiction that arises from a hypothetical scenario involving time travel. The literature groups them into three families: bootstrap paradoxes, where an object or piece of information causes itself with no discoverable origin; consistency paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox, where changing the past creates a logical contradiction; and free-will causality paradoxes such as Newcomb's paradox, where a prediction about a choice interacts with the choice itself. ## Microsim — queued <p class="wt-pending"><strong>Microsim/diagram layer in the draft queue.</strong> Troy is building the interactive station for this concept by hand; the sourced overview below is complete and citable now.</p> ## Overview Proposed resolutions include the Novikov self-consistency principle, which holds that only self-consistent trips to the past are possible; many-worlds interpretations, in which a changed past simply branches into a different timeline; and accounts that treat time itself as emergent rather than fundamental. Physicists and philosophers remain divided on whether backward time travel is logically or physically possible at all — but the closed, self-referential causal path at the center of every temporal paradox is the same shape of loop that a [[Causal_loop_diagram|causal loop diagram]] draws for ordinary feedback, and the same shape a [[Strange_loop|strange loop]] draws for self-reference. **On the spine:** [[Causal_loop_diagram]] · [[Strange_loop]] · [[Feedback]]. ## Wikipedia : Wikitube **Strict pair:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox) : [Wikitube](https://en.wikitube.io/wiki/Temporal_paradox) ## Previous hub tags Hubs: `Systems`. Portals: [[PORTAL_Causal_loop_diagram]]. --- *Repopulated 2026-08-05 · text transfer · 0 deletions.*