The Last Witness Pradox

This paper introduces "The Last Witness Paradox," an epistemological time-travel paradox that demonstrates the logical collapse of a single, mutable timeline. The thought experiment posits a scenario where a perfectly infallible recording device captures the temporal order of two distinct events. A time traveler then alters the past, producing a second, equally infallible but mutually exclusive record of the exact same events. Because both records are permanently accurate, immune to temporal erasure, and exist within a single timeline, the universe is forced to simultaneously prove that Event A preceded Event B, and Event B preceded Event A. This paper explores how this strict set of parameters renders traditional resolutions—such as the Novikov self-consistency principle or branching timelines—inapplicable without violating fundamental logical axioms.