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An oversimplified explanation of the mind-numbingly paradoxical Banach-Tarski theorem states that a solid sphere can be cut into non-overlapping pieces (geometricians would say that such a ball has been "decomposed"), and reassembled in a new arrangement, such that the end result is two identical copies of the original sphere — conservation of mass be damned. More »
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JM Parrondo is a casino and con artist's worst nightmare. In the 1990s, he invented two games that are sure to lose you everything. They're both mathematically designed to make you go broke, but play them one after another and you are guaranteed to win. More »
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How's your Monday coming along? Pretty rough? Well it's about to get a little hairier. If I'm not mistaken, this self-referential brain teaser is a play on the age-old Liar's paradox, (or, for those of you familiar with set theory, Russell's paradox), reframed in the form of a multiple-choice question. More »
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How many people need to be crowded into a room before two of them are likely to have the same birthday? The answer is a mere 23 to have a fifty-fifty shot. To bring the probability to ninety-nine percent, you need a crowd of only fifty-seven people. And yet there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. What's going on? More »
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A crucial goal for the Large Hadron Collider is to find the long-sought Higgs boson. It might also create another Higgs particle that only travels through hidden dimensions, meaning it can pop in and out of any point in time. More »
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Time travel isn't just science fiction: Albert Einstein's general relativity suggests it could exist. And now we might have solved the tricky matter of time paradoxes. It's all just a question of adjusting probabilities. More »
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Once you glimpse the future, can you change it? That's the question asked by the BBC's new miniseries Paradox, about a scientist and a detective who team up to prevent a major catastrophe, using clues sent from the future. More »
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When you travel through time and space, you're bound to run into yourself occasionally. These meetings can be awkward, embarrassing, or lead to uncontrollable fainting, but there are some things your future self can teach you better than anyone else. More »
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If you've always thought "I wish that someone would make a television show out've Minority Report, only with soap stars replacing Tom Cruise," then you may just be interested in new BBC series Paradox. More »
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Click to viewNext month sees the release of Valkyrie, a film about Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Plenty of time travelers have had the same idea, although their plan was to kill Hitler before he enacted mass genocide. Their intentions may be noble, but the plans always seem to go awry, leaving history unchanged or even worse than when they left. We list all the ways their attempts go wrong, so you can plan your time travel accordingly. More »
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