A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox, is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel or other foreknowledge of the future. While the notion of time travel to the future complies with current understanding of physics via relativistic time dilation, temporal paradoxes arise from circumstances involving hypothetical time travel to the past – and are often used to demonstrate its impossibility. Temporal paradoxes fall into three broad groups: bootstrap paradoxes, consistency paradoxes, and Newcomb's paradox.
Temporal paradoxes fall into three broad groups: bootstrap paradoxes, consistency paradoxes, and Newcomb's paradox. Bootstrap paradoxes violate causality by allowing future events to influence the past and cause themselves, or "Bootstrapping", which derives from the idiom "." Consistency paradoxes, on the other hand, are those where future events influence the past to cause an apparent contradiction, exemplified by the grandfather paradox, where a person travels to the past to kill their own grandfather. Newcomb's paradox stems from the apparent contradictions that stem from the assumptions of both free will and foreknowledge of future events. All of these are sometimes referred to individually as "causal loops." The term "time loop" is sometimes referred to as a causal loop, but although they appear similar, causal loops are unchanging and self-originating, whereas time loops are constantly resetting.
A boot-strap paradox, also known as an information loop, an information paradox, an ontological paradox, or a "predestination paradox" is a paradox of time travel that occurs when any event, such as an action, information, an object, or a person, which ultimately causes itself, as a consequence of either retrocausality or time travel.
Backwards time travel would allow information, people or objects whose histories seem to "come from nowhere." Such causally looped events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined.