grandfather paradox

Meaning

Noun

• The paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past.

Origin

• From the paradox proposed by the French author René Barjavel in 1944 in his book Le Voyageur Imprudent, translated into English as "Future Times Three"; in its original form the paradox of one person going back to the past and killing their biological grandfather before the latter fathered the traveller's father, thus preventing the time traveller from ever being conceived in the first place.