Some of my favorite paradoxes.

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

Alan Watts

My favorite question when taking on any new idea is, “Does this help me on my path to see the world as it truly is?” I love discovering those “ah-ha” moments, those breakthrough moments, when something elegant and beautiful emerges from the ether. Of the tools that have brought me the most joy, the paradox stands alone. A Paradox is a dance with the absurd and a catalyst for breakthroughs in thinking.

Here are a few of my favorite paradoxes, in no particular order:

• Russell's Paradox: Consider a set that contains all sets that do not contain themselves. Does this set contain itself?

• The Halting Problem: It's impossible to determine in every case whether a given program will eventually stop or run forever.

• Gödel's incompleteness theorems: Any sufficiently powerful logical system is either incomplete (there are true statements that can't be proved within the system) or inconsistent (it contains contradictions).

• Schrödinger's Cat: A thought experiment in quantum physics where a cat in a sealed box can be considered both dead and alive.

• Maxwell’s Demon: A thought experiment that seemingly violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

• Bell’s Theorem: a counterintuitive demonstration that quantum mechanics is with theories on local hidden variables.

• Quine’s Paradox: "yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

• Barry Paradox: "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters."

• Epimenides paradox: It reveals a problem with self-reference in logic referenced in Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter

• The birthday paradox: The counterintuitive fact is that it only takes 23 people in a room to have a 50% chance of two people sharing the same birthday.

• Bell’s Spaceship Paradox: A paradox on spacetime contraction and a length of rope between two spaceships.