Bootstrap Paradox: A Big Hassle in Time Travelling

Pull yourself over a fence by pulling your bootstrap

Sounds impossible, right?

Likewise, time traveling in the past is also impossible because it faces many paradoxes like the bootstrap paradox.

In the bootstrap paradox, an object or a piece of information gets trapped in an endless loop, but no one knows the point of origin of that information or object. Confused right?

Simple Example of Bootstrap Paradox

One day, when you’re at home. Someone rings the doorbell of your house. When you open the door, there is no one but a book at your doorstep with the title “how to build a time machine?”

At first, you don’t take it seriously. But after reading the whole book you found it credible and starts working on the time machine. After working on the project for years, you succeed in building a time machine.

But you don’t know where you have to go first? and suddenly, a question comes to your mind “Who left the book at your doorstep?” and decided to take a drive a few hours before you found the book.

After reaching there and waiting for hours near your house, no one comes. In frustration, you left your book at your doorstep and pressed the doorbell button, and bam it was your future self who left the book at your doorstep.

But the question is, what is the origin of this book? and how the book is still intact and unaffected by the passage of time?

No one knows!

But the bootstrap paradox is theoretical in nature that you'll found in theoretical physics books or TV shows like Dark.

Nobody knows what comes after when you travel to the past.

Is the bootstrap paradox is possible?

Theoretically, it is impossible because it violates two laws of physics

First Law of Thermodynamics and Bootstrap Paradox

The first law of thermodynamics states that the energy of a closed system like our universe will remain constant.

From the Einstien equation of mass and energy E=mc², energy and mass are interchangeable. So no mass or energy ( person and book ) can enter a closed system from nowhere.

Law of Entropy

Entropy is referred to as a gradual change or disorder in the universe or a closed system. It is also named the arrow of time. As renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkings said that;

The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

in his book a Brief History of Time.

As in every passing second, the universe is expanding at a very gradual rate. The entropy or disorder of the universe is also increasing with time.

So if anyone wants to travel through time to the past the entropy of the universe should be decreasing.

For example, in a video, a cube of ice is melting at a steady rate the entropy of the disorder of the ice cube is increasing. If you want to go to the past of the ice when it was completely cubic you have to reverse the video. Which is in the case of the universe is an impossible task to do.