If you could go back and prevent your own origin, you were never there to go back. Time travel's oldest objection, and physics' least favorite dinner guest.
Documented
From pulp pages to physics journals
The paradox appeared in print in 1931 in American science fiction magazines, was named by Rene Barjavel in Le Voyageur Imprudent (1943), and moved into serious physics when general relativity produced exact solutions containing closed timelike curves: Godel's rotating universe (1949), Tipler's cylinders, traversable wormholes. Physicists answered with two shields: Novikov's self-consistency principle, which permits time travel but forbids any change, and Hawking's chronology protection conjecture, which argues quantum effects destroy any time machine the moment it switches on.
Assessment: Every element is documented: the stories, the solutions, the principles. What is not documented is a single closed timelike curve in nature. The paradox remains a thought experiment that real equations keep inviting and real observations keep declining.
Stories
Hollywood's favorite broken rule
Popular culture runs on this paradox the way cars run on petrol: Back to the Future's fading photograph, Terminator's John Connor engineering his own father, a hundred time cops explaining that you must not touch anything. The folk version holds a fixed belief physics never endorsed, that the past is a place you can visit and vandalize.
Assessment: The films are documented as films. Their rules are invented per script, contradict each other cheerfully, and have taught the public a physics that no working physicist holds. The paradox survives in culture precisely because nobody on screen is allowed to resolve it honestly.
Interesting claims
The universe protects its own plot
The interesting claim: the consistency requirement is not a limitation but a discovery, meaning history has a fact of the matter so rigid that even a time traveler inside it can only ever have done what was always done. Free will, in this reading, was the first casualty, and the grandfather was never in danger because your gun was always going to jam.
Assessment: Self-consistency is a legitimate technical proposal, but it is one patch among rivals, and Hawking's competing conjecture says the machine simply never exists. Nothing in observation favors either. What the eso reading adds, destiny wearing a lab coat, is philosophy, not measurement.
Sources and further reading
Barjavel, Le Voyageur Imprudent (1943), the naming
Nahin, Time Machines (1999), the full genealogy of the idea in fiction and physics
Godel, An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions (1949), the first closed timelike curves
Novikov, self-consistency papers, and Thorne et al., wormhole papers, Physical Review
Hawking, Chronology Protection Conjecture, Physical Review D (1992)
Worth asking
Every escape hatch, self-consistency, parallel timelines, chronology protection, saves physics by costing you free will. Which would you rather lose?