Howling:The Stone Rose Paradox

The Howling → The Stone Rose Paradox

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I recently read one of the Tenth Doctor novels The Stone Rose and at the end a paradox occurs that should technically be impossible. I doubt many of you will uave read the nivel recently, if at all, so I will explain the paradox below. Spoilers for the novel follow.

Rose finds a vial full of magical liquid and uses most of it up. She asks a GENIE (a kind of robot from the future that grants wishes) to refill the vial. The Genie refills the SAME vial and gives it to Rose. She then leaves it for her past self to find. However with every loop the bottle still ages slightly. So in one of those loops after the vial is touched in the same spot millions of times it will be little mor than dust. How the Hell does this work? Presumably GENIE first discovered the liquid and that started the paradox. But again, what about the vial? Did GENIE restore it? Is it a fixed point in time, like Jack, doomed to go around and around in that loop for all eternity? Does the liquid have magical healing properties? Or does the writer of the book kniw nothing of the basic rules of timetravel? 94.72.209.160^{talk to me} 14:05, December 31, 2011 (UTC)

There's a probability that a bottle harms and wears in each iteration, but there is also a slight probability that it doesn't. In each iteration, there is always one probability that it is left in a completely intact state at the end of the iteration, and this probability would be the pre-requisit for the paradox to be valid.

The history or information aspect of the bottle, on the other hand, is a completely different question, each iteration would imply Rose picking up a bottle with a different history. The paradox requires the universe to be unaffected by information other than physical state and also for infinity to be a valid concept, both of which we are not sure in the Universe. --222.166.181.106^{talk to me} 23:44, December 31, 2011 (UTC)

I've not read the novel, so I can only go by what you've said, here. The writer may know the rules but simply have slipped up in respect of the vial. There's an old saying that "even Homer nods". It's also possible there was an explanation that got cut because an editor thought it was boring and unnecessary. (It wouldn't be the first time an author has been left cursing an editor for cutting something that shouldn't have been cut.) Does the novel itself say the vial ages or is that your own conclusion? If it's yours, the author may have intended the GENIE to put the vial into a true time loop, in which case the aging won't accumulate; it'll be "reset" at the start of each cycle. --89.242.75.91^{talk to me} 23:51, December 31, 2011 (UTC)