Artifacts that exist only and because of time loops

[xvxdarkknightxvx]

I remember back before these forums were subscription based, there was a thread about this. The basic idea was that there are items which exist because of time loops. For example, a guy goes to the future, and digs up a wierd object that no one knows what it was. He sells it to a museum, and over time the museum crumbles to the ground, depositing the object back where the guy eventually comes and finds it. In the thread, I believed these artifacts were called "jins", but I can't remember for sure. I tried googling for this, but there wasn't anything that matched. Anyone remember what they're called or have any extra information on this topic? Thanks in advance.

[DocCathode]

They are called jinn particles (or possibly djinn particles). Close, but no eternal and self-creating cigar.

[DocCathode]

What's the name of this paradox? (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=249782)

[Diceman]

I believe they're called djinns. "Djinn" is an old name for a genie. The implication is that the object can only exist thru magic, because it has no real origin.

Perhaps the most famous example is: a man goes back in time. He meets a woman, falls in love, marries her, and has a son. Years later, that son goes back in time. He meets a woman, marries her, and has a son. It turns out that the time traveler has married his own mother, and he is his own father!!!

Another, less incestual, example of a d'jinn goes something like this:

I'm sitting here at my computer one evening, when all of a sudden a time portal opens up, and a future version of myself steps out. Future Diceman gives Present Diceman (me) a watch, and tells me that 30 years from now I'll be involved in some time travel experiments, and to hold onto the watch until then. Future Diceman then goes back thru the time portal into the furture.

So, 30 years pass, and sure enough I join up with some cutting-edge scientists who invent a time machine. They send me back in time 30 years and I meet myself. I give my past self the watch, and tell him what Future Diceman told me, and then I return to my own time.

The watch seems to have no origin. It just goes around and around in an endless loop.

[DocCathode]

Time Loops (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=158729)

Time Travel Paradox=Logically Equivalent For Russel's Paradox? (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=134493)

A time travel question (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=122177&)

[Whack-a-Mole]

Another, less incestual, example of a d'jinn goes something like this:

For the best take on this idea out there watch Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

[Mr. Blue Sky]

See also The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, Hyperion, & The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

[Crandolph]

I believe they're called djinns. "Djinn" is an old name for a genie.

Djinn is the original Arabic word that we derived "genie" from.

[MaryEFoo]

OK, I'm working on a time machine at 2:00 pm, and it's almost ready to test. Suddenly someone who looks just like me pops up and says, "Hey, so far so good. Now to test the return. Meanwhile, here's my wristwatch, let me have it back when you see me next", and disappears.

Understanding perfectly, I put it in my pocket. It takes about an hour to finish setting up the machine and suddenly, my apparent twin appears again in it, saying, "Hey, the return works too! Wow!" I say "Great!" and hand her the watch she gave me, and get into the machine and start it up to perform the one-hour back-in-time test. This is at 3:00 pm by the watch on my wrist.

What time does the watch she is holding show?

It shows 4:00, and there's no paradox


What if the loop starts by the past me handing her watch to the timetravelling me?

It shows 2:00, and there's no paradox. If I take it back with me for the test, it will come out even. If not, it just needs to be reset by one hour.

I'm thinking the djinn object can't happen, any more than any other object without a source can happen. Prove me wrong? :)

[Whack-a-Mole]

I'm thinking the djinn object can't happen, any more than any other object without a source can happen. Prove me wrong? :)

You're right it probably can't happen unless you buy into the Many Universes interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (not sure how else you can get around these issues if you want to say it can happen).

The issue here isn't what time your watch reads. It is where did the watch come from? In your case you presumably bought the watch then gave it to yourself (you were wearing the watch at the outset).

In the OP his future self gave him a watch that he carried into the future (the normal, slow way we all progress forward...no time machine) then goes back and gives himself the watch which is carried into the future. Repeat ad naseum (time loop). The issue is where did the watch come from? There is no external event where future or present person went out and got a watch. It is just there hence a paradox (can't get something from nothing).

[Sunspace]

How does time flow as observed by the watch?

[Whack-a-Mole]

How does time flow as observed by the watch?

At 1 second = 1 second like any watch.

It does not rewind or fast forward itself as you jump back and forth in time.

[Yllaria]

I was afraid to follow the linked threads back in time for fear I'd find a subsequent link to a previous thread which would turn out to be this one.

[Sunspace]

At 1 second = 1 second like any watch.

It does not rewind or fast forward itself as you jump back and forth in time.Not quite what I was getting at. MaryEFoo has it.

Imagine looking out from the watch. Say that, just before it is given from the older MaryEFoo to the younger (as in the example upthread), it reads 2:00. It travels forward an hour, and reads 3:00. The older MaryEFoo then gives it to the younger MaryEFoo again.

From the watch's frame of reference, reality would seem to be an endless stream of the following events: Be given from the older MaryEFoo to the younger. Travel back in time. Experience an hour while MaryEFoo sets up the time machine. Go to step 1.If this could happen, it would seem that the watch would wear, break, and disintegrate eventually as it travels round and round the loop.

The only way around it would be for the watch to reverse-change while it is traveling backwards through time.

[Derleth]

I recall a science fiction story with this exact premise, but I quite conveniently cannot recall the author or title. Maybe one of you can help me.

The protagonist (or his grandfather... isn't my memory great?) goes into the future and finds a knife in the ruins of a museum. He takes it back with him and it proves quite impervious: The best modern man is capable of is etching a small notch in its body. It is placed in a museum, which (of course) becomes the ruins of a museum I referred to in the beginning of this paragraph.

I probably read it in Analog, a magazine I no longer subscribe to. Can anyone help me with this?

Sunspace: That's interesting. It would imply that you could judge how many loops the watch has made, even though observers outside the loop would only see it twice. In other words, it isn't really a loop.

Of course, you could also judge by how many MaryEFoos are running around.

[Meatros]

Wasn't Donnie Darko about this sort of concept?

[Mangetout]

Something like this.

[Mangetout]

I suppose it would be possible to travel back in time and post again to this thread, or something like that, but if I do that, the post will already be there now, before this one, so I should be able to quote it:

Something like this.

[Doctor Jackson]

Yllaria
I was afraid to follow the linked threads back in time for fear I'd find a subsequent link to a previous thread which would turn out to be this one.

Heh. You make my head hurt.

[Mangetout]

Likewise, I can go into the future and quote a post that I haven't yet made; hang on a second...


Yup:

See?

[Mangetout]

See?

[jjimm]

Heinlein's The Door Into Summer deals with this (guy goes back in time and patents objects he knows will exist in the future, thus making loads of money), and of course H2G2 has lots of this, including going backwards in time to build a huge building you need today, and some resultant paradox that I can't quite remember now...

[Annie-Xmas]

This reminds me of the Futurama where Fry went back in time and became his own grandfather by impregnanting his grandmother.

[Mangetout]

Time loops are also used extensively in a novel by the name of Time's Square - I forget the author.

[Derleth]

Wasn't Donnie Darko about this sort of concept?I don't think so. Donnie Darko's time travel was not closed-off like the examples here.

[Desmostylus]

Heinlein's The Door Into Summer deals with this (guy goes back in time and patents objects he knows will exist in the future, thus making loads of money), and of course H2G2 has lots of this, including going backwards in time to build a huge building you need today, and some resultant paradox that I can't quite remember now...Heinlein did quite a few of these stories. In "By his bootstraps" a notebook is created by the time-loop, and in "All you zombies", the protagonist is shown to be both his own father and mother, i.e., he himself was the product of the time-loop.

[RiverRunner]

Stanislaw Lem's Tales of Pilot Pirx had my favorite time loop story. Pirx had to create a time loop somehow (using a giant sta'rs gravity well, maybe?) so he would have someone to help him fix his spaceship. Turned out that his future self was something of a jerk. At one point, he had a ship full of Pirxes running around, none of whom were cooperating with each other. Eventually, two child Pirxes ended up fixing the ship. Great stuff.

Also, Lem's Cyberiad was a hoot.


RR

[Exapno Mapcase]

A site and a book that will give you more on time travel than you ever wanted to know.

The Time Machine (http://www.timemachine.esmartweb.com/index1.html). Check the Links page for a long list of books and movies.

Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, by Paul J. Nahin (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/156396371X/qid=1097592162/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/104-5217359-6957507?v=glance&s=books).

[chrisk]

Just to chime in another pop culture reference... in Harry Harrison's 'stainless steel rat saves the world', the villain known only as 'He', turns out to be a living djinn, in that he is never born, and never dies... His travels through time form an closed loop. Once the loop is closed, his career is finished, because he can never break out of his history and try any other scheme. I have to admit, that notion is pretty far out.

I like the term... can we extend it as far as 'djinn meme' or 'djinn idea' to express a concept/idea/thought that was never conceived independently by any person but can be traced back entirely to a time travel loop? (For instance, bringing the five weyrs forward in 'dragonflight' -- Lessa guesses that it has already happened because of the historical circumstances of the dragonrider's disappearance, and the question song, but then she goes back in time, suggests to the past dragonriders that they should come forward, and basically tells the masterharper at that time that he has to write the question song. :) )

PS: always be wary of the information in a djinn meme - false facts can be generated by those temporal causality loops as easily as true facts. :)

[RiverRunner]

Just to chime in another pop culture reference... in Harry Harrison's 'stainless steel rat saves the world', the villain known only as 'He', turns out to be a living djinn, in that he is never born, and never dies... His travels through time form an closed loop. Once the loop is closed, his career is finished, because he can never break out of his history and try any other scheme.

Yeah, fun book.


Question: if you managed to stretch out the time loop, would you end up with "slow djinn?"


RR

[Peter Morris]

A few other examples:

David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself
A time traveller turns out to be his own father, his own mother, his own son and his own daughter. And also his own grandfather, or was it uncle.

Star Trek movies - no spoiler required. In Star Trek IV the crew travel back in time. to raise a little money, Kirk sells a pair of antique spectacles. In the future, Doc McCoy buys the same pair of specs, and gives it to Kirk for his birthday.
Meanwhile Scotty gives the secret of transparent aluminum to it's inventor, who wouldn't have discovered it otherwise.

[CandidGamera]

A few other examples:

Star Trek movies - no spoiler required. In Star Trek IV the crew travel back in time. to raise a little money, Kirk sells a pair of antique spectacles. In the future, Doc McCoy buys the same pair of specs, and gives it to Kirk for his birthday.
Meanwhile Scotty gives the secret of transparent aluminum to it's inventor, who wouldn't have discovered it otherwise.

Iffy.

While Kirk's comments in the antique store amusingly hint that those spectacles might, three hundred years later, be the ones McCoy purchases for him, we don't know that they are.

And again, with the Transparent Aluminum - Scotty's comment is 'How do we know he didn't invent the stuff?' One, I find it odd that Mr. Scott, master engineer, doesn't remember the name of the man who invented this important starship material. Two - again, we're not certain of the djinn effect here. Someone across the country might've been developing it at the same time as the Enterprise crew was handing it over to this manufacturer.

[audreyayn]

H2G2 has lots of this, including going backwards in time to build a huge building you need today, and some resultant paradox that I can't quite remember now...

They want to replace a Cathedral with a new building. In order to meet a deadline, they go back in time to build it. It takes so long to build the new building that the Cathedral is never built. This makes postcards of it extremely valuable.

[Boldface Type]

I recall a science fiction story with this exact premise, but I quite conveniently cannot recall the author or title. Maybe one of you can help me.

There have been many with the same sort of idea. In the one I remember (well, cannot recall the author or title), back in the Mists of Time, some chap visits the ancient equivalent of a bank, and deposits an odd looking coin, saying that he will return after some set amount of time to claim the return on his investment. Anyway, he returns many times over the years, and his investment grows in value - 1000s of years of compound interest will do that. As we reach the present, the original odd coin starts to look very familiar...

In the denouement, the investor suddenly decides to liquidate, turning his investment into hard cash. He does this so that he can build his time machine which he's been working on for many years.

Now who was that author / story title? Hmmm.

[chrisk]

Iffy.

While Kirk's comments in the antique store amusingly hint that those spectacles might, three hundred years later, be the ones McCoy purchases for him, we don't know that they are.

And again, with the Transparent Aluminum - Scotty's comment is 'How do we know he didn't invent the stuff?' One, I find it odd that Mr. Scott, master engineer, doesn't remember the name of the man who invented this important starship material. Two - again, we're not certain of the djinn effect here. Someone across the country might've been developing it at the same time as the Enterprise crew was handing it over to this manufacturer.

Yeah, two good examples of how it can be hard to tell a true djinn effect from a relatively simple time loop. The spectacles are obviously the same ones that mccoy has already purchased for kirk, but we don't know for sure that the loop closes and mccoy also purchases them AFTER they get sold to the antiques store. (For one thing, you'd expect a certain amount of wear and tear over a few centuries, even if only on a molecular level, and if that damage isn't repaired then the djinn effect can't take place.)

The best way to look at the non-djinn hypothesis is that for those several hundred years there might be two different copies of that pair of glasses somewhere on earth... (until first contact, when presumably the copy that kirk sells might be taken off-world.)

Did that make any sense??

[CandidGamera]

Did that make any sense??

Yup.

Also, Star Trek is a bad example to use for this sort of thing because the ST universe allows causality paradoxes. If you go back in time and erase your own future existence - you're still there, back in time, and relatively okay. Even if you go back to your correct time, you'll still be okay. If you and a buddy go back and your buddy kills your past self, you're still there in the past with him. You don't pull a Marty McFly and fade out. (Witness the Enterprise episodes - Shockwave, pts 1 & 2 for an illustration. Or ST : First Contact - The Enterprise E gets a nice view of the Borg-dominated Earth as they're plowing into the temporal anomaly)

[Whack-a-Mole]

Or ST : First Contact - The Enterprise E gets a nice view of the Borg-dominated Earth as they're plowing into the temporal anomaly)

IIRC they say that they are protected from the changes they are witnessing to the earth by the time vortex doohickey they were in.

Of course, Star Trek plays fast and loose with all of this but hey, it's fiction and fun to watch. Any fiction that uses time travel will have to make assumptions and take liberties that can have holes poked in it if you want to. I am serious that I think Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure actually got time paradox weirdness more right than most movies. Of course they offer no explanations...it just is and our heroes move blissfully ignorant through all of it not questioning which is part of its charm.

[CandidGamera]

IIRC they say that they are protected from the changes they are witnessing to the earth by the time vortex doohickey they were in.

Yes, they were protected because they were already being displaced in time.

[aerodave]

According to this article, Paul Nahin from UNH says that Bill and Ted is the most scientifically sound time-travel movie ever made.

Check the bottom of this page:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3541435/

[Peter Morris]

Another one:

Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

Dios the high priest has lived for thousands of years, advising the line of kings. At the end, he gets blasted back into the past, where he meets the first king, and starts to tell him about pyramids and gods and stuff. His staff carries the image of a snake with it's tail in it's mouth, probably highly significant but he doesn't know what it means.

[Emilio Lizardo]

Didn't the same thing happen in the Terminator series? As I recall, in T2, we learn that the computer chips from the original robot, which had been sent back in time from the future, were the inspiration for the development of the computer which later built that same robot. So no one actually discovered these new technologies, the just came into being.

[CandidGamera]

According to this article, Paul Nahin from UNH says that Bill and Ted is the most scientifically sound time-travel movie ever made.

Kinda. Bill and Ted has an informational djinn.

Future Bill and Ted introduce Rufus to Past Bill and Ted at the Circle K. They never learn his name from any other source, up until the moment when they, as future B&T, introduce their past selves to Rufus.

[jsc1953]

Another pop culture djinn (I didn't know these had a name...very cool) is in Back to the Future. Marty McFly performs Chuck Berry's "Johnny B Goode" at the prom; someone there phones his cousin -- Chuck Berry -- and tells him to listen to this great new song...so Chuck Berry and Marty McFly each think they learned the song from the other.

[chrisk]

Kinda. Bill and Ted has an informational djinn.

Future Bill and Ted introduce Rufus to Past Bill and Ted at the Circle K. They never learn his name from any other source, up until the moment when they, as future B&T, introduce their past selves to Rufus.

Is a djinn scientifically unsound?? Personally, I think that if time-travel becomes possible, you'd get this sort of thing happening occasionally. :D

[CandidGamera]

Is a djinn scientifically unsound?? Personally, I think that if time-travel becomes possible, you'd get this sort of thing happening occasionally. :D

It is a causality paradox. If that article's author asserts its resolved 'correctly' then I'm not sure what he means by 'correctly', I guess.

[chrisk]

It is a causality paradox. If that article's author asserts its resolved 'correctly' then I'm not sure what he means by 'correctly', I guess.

It's not the same as causality paradox, or any kind of paradox. A causality paradox is a chain of events that leads to the contradiction of one of the premises.

A djinn, by analogy, is a chain of events that leads back to one of the premises. In propositional logic terms, if a paradox is a= not a, a djinn would be a=a... it doesn't really make much sense, but it's not paradoxical. (That's how I understand it at least.)

[Padeye]

The djinn effect makes for better fiction than stories with no paradoxes. Archeologist digs up an artifact, it sits in a museum for thousands of years, time traveller takes it back to before it's discovery and digs a hole where it will be discovered....
Well son of a bitch, there's already one here.

I think that applies to Kirk's spectales too. He tries to sell them to a pawn shop but the owner already has a pair virtually identnical to them except they aren't broken and the metal appears to have 300 years less patina. Bones buys the unbroken pair from the great-great-great-great...grandson of the shop owner, gives them to kirk who breaks them...

Padeye - raining on your parade for 43 years

[Whack-a-Mole]

Is a djinn scientifically unsound?? Personally, I think that if time-travel becomes possible, you'd get this sort of thing happening occasionally. :D

Well...hard to see how they could be allowed because of they are then things could get really weird.

The only out I see is (I think), as I mentioned earlier, appealing to the Many Universes interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. IIRC most respectable scientists do now subscribe to that interpretation but they can't quite dismiss it so it lingers.

Essentially I am thinking rather than time travelling in one timeline you bounce to alternate universes ala the TV show Sliders. If Many Universes is correct then there are an infinite number of them and you can find one in pretty much any configuration you can think of. In this way you can avoid your djinns and time loops and paradoxes as each time you "time travel" you merely end up in a different universe that merely looks like you time travelled. Anything you do there does not affect your originating universe so killing your dad before he met your mom would not see you go *poof* or result in a paradox (they still met and had you in your originating universe).

NOTE: I mention all this for fun and as a remote possibility. I am not advocating Many Universes theory (but I do think it makes for fun sci-fi).

[MLS]

Another example is the movie Somewhere in Time, starring the (now unfortunately late) Christopher Reeve. An old lady gives him a beautiful pocket watch and says "Come back to me." Later, he travels back in time, meets the same lady in her youth and gives her the pocket watch, shortly before he is unexpectedly swept back to the original time frame.

[Odinoneeye]

Harry Harrison was big on this. Besides the aforementioned Stainless Steel Rat, there was The Technicolor Time Machine. A man has a weekend to make a movie, so he goes back in time to film the vikings landing in America. The drawback is that you must return to a point in time after you left. He tries to budget his present time so that the movie would be ready by Monday and fails. As he is going in to tell them he doesn't have a movie, his future self appears and gives him a piece of paper. The paper basically says, "finish the movie then come back to this point and give it to them". He does that and then gives that paper to himself.

The djinn is the paper.

Also, he did a story in which a scientist sends a camera back in time to see if he can figure out why Stonehenge was built. It was built because the natives thought the camera was an object from the gods.

[SnakeSpirit]

Man, you're going to think this is wierd, but I've seen this thread before!

Right here! (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=280419)

This is scary!

[Diceman]

The only out I see is (I think), as I mentioned earlier, appealing to the Many Universes interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. IIRC most respectable scientists do now subscribe to that interpretation but they can't quite dismiss it so it lingers.

Essentially I am thinking rather than time travelling in one timeline you bounce to alternate universes ala the TV show Sliders. If Many Universes is correct then there are an infinite number of them and you can find one in pretty much any configuration you can think of. In this way you can avoid your djinns and time loops and paradoxes as each time you "time travel" you merely end up in a different universe that merely looks like you time travelled. Anything you do there does not affect your originating universe so killing your dad before he met your mom would not see you go *poof* or result in a paradox (they still met and had you in your originating universe).
There's an interesting wrinkle with this theory. If you send me back in time, but I arrive in the past in some alternate universe, then how can you know that I arrived safely? To you, it will look like I vanished out of existence, because I'm not in your past, and no matter how many history books and museums you look in, you won't find any trace of me.

[LeeshaJoy]

Another one:

Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

His staff carries the image of a snake with it's tail in it's mouth, probably highly significant but he doesn't know what it means.

That would be an ouroboros. It's a symbol of the cycle of life, death, and renewal. It also shows up in the Red Dwarf episode where Lister discovers that he's his own dad.

[ntcrawler]

[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]Well...hard to see how they could be allowed because of they are then things could get really weird.

The only out I see is (I think), as I mentioned earlier, appealing to the Many Universes interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. IIRC most respectable scientists do now subscribe to that interpretation but they can't quite dismiss it so it lingers.


But by their very definition, Djinns can't happen. As using the example of Terminator 2, chips sent back in time and then buried, dug up and analyzed means that the technology was never invented in the first place. So what happened? Some god-like being such as Q tossed something into our mixing bowl of a universe? Spiked the punch as it were?

If anything, they are most likely the effects of bad writing, or the authors not realizing some detail that nitpickers would later catch.

[ntcrawler]

There's an interesting wrinkle with this theory. If you send me back in time, but I arrive in the past in some alternate universe, then how can you know that I arrived safely? To you, it will look like I vanished out of existence, because I'm not in your past, and no matter how many history books and museums you look in, you won't find any trace of me.

That's assuming you ended up in another universe. But if he were to pick up tomorrow's newspayer and see an article that was paid in advance 30 years to publish (ok, I'm wondering here could this actually be done? could you actually ask the postal service to deliver a package 30 years later to a gentleman in a black coat in the middle of the dessert, or to publish an ad on July 12th 2060?), saying something along the lines of "hi there, it's me. I arrived safe and sound" then you'd know he got there.

On the other hand, the person who's back in time, if he ended up in a paralllel universe but not the one he was supposed to go to, he'd probably never know, and the ad he would want to publih 30 years in the future would never be seen by its intended recipient.

[SnakeSpirit]

or to publish an ad on July 12th 2060?
Wholly shit! My 113th Birthday!
How did you know? Who are you working for?
Whatever they offered you, I'll double it, no TRIPLE!


Julius IV

[chrisk]

But by their very definition, Djinns can't happen. As using the example of Terminator 2, chips sent back in time and then buried, dug up and analyzed means that the technology was never invented in the first place. So what happened? Some god-like being such as Q tossed something into our mixing bowl of a universe? Spiked the punch as it were?

If anything, they are most likely the effects of bad writing, or the authors not realizing some detail that nitpickers would later catch.

Okay... I think I see the issue... it's that djinns are a paradox along the lines of the 'chicken and the egg' paradox. Personally, I never thought that was much of a paradox.

We're used to situations in which every idea has a moment of first conception, every being a moment of birth or origination, every object a moment of construction. But... well, in my opinion, these are only laws in the framework in which time flows only one direction from a starting point where only one thing exists. IE, the universe as we generally know it to be from scientific observation.

If time travel turns out to be possible, and based on a non-multiple timelines structure... (things do get complicated if you allow for many universes interacting through time travel,) then I think those laws about everything having a cause would break down. If closed loops through time are possible, then there might well be things that simply inhabit those loops, never being 'caused' by anything, or at least not by anything other than the simple use of time travel. They just happen, and you'd have to get used to that. :)

Now, of course, there's still a huge opportunity for bad writing, in that the things that the kind of djinns that would pop up should be more or less random (though possibly still relating to the structure of the rest of the universe around them,) and should not necessarily show bias to the necessities of the plot. An idea that originated as a djinn should not necessarily be true, unless its falsity could be verified and would logically contradict it from being propagated through the loop. (In the Bill and Ted example, for instance... how do we know that the character's name was actually given accurately??) A wristwatch should be no more likely to appear as a material djinn than a pink tuque with purple polka dots on it, or a typed transcript of the hiring interview for rudolph the red-nosed reindeer conducted by santa claus, in Esperanto. (That one is one of my favorite examples for material that would be produced by an infinite number of monkeys pecking randomly on an infinite number of typewriters. :) )

Okay, please feel free to trash my philosophical theories now. ;)

[HPL]

There have been many with the same sort of idea. In the one I remember (well, cannot recall the author or title), back in the Mists of Time, some chap visits the ancient equivalent of a bank, and deposits an odd looking coin, saying that he will return after some set amount of time to claim the return on his investment. Anyway, he returns many times over the years, and his investment grows in value - 1000s of years of compound interest will do that. As we reach the present, the original odd coin starts to look very familiar...

In the denouement, the investor suddenly decides to liquidate, turning his investment into hard cash. He does this so that he can build his time machine which he's been working on for many years.

Now who was that author / story title? Hmmm.

Was it supposed to take place on Earth? Is the travel's present our future or our present? I can't think of any banks that have been in existance for 1000's of years.

[Enola Straight]

Didn't the same thing happen in the Terminator series? As I recall, in T2, we learn that the computer chips from the original robot, which had been sent back in time from the future, were the inspiration for the development of the computer which later built that same robot. So no one actually discovered these new technologies, the just came into being.

Also, John Connor touches on the concept as follows:

sees the words NO FATE carved in the wood

"No fate...no fate but what me make...this is part of the message my dad told my mom to give to me...I mean, I told him as a message to my mom..." :smack:

Where is the ultimate origin of the message?

[DocCathode]

Post will include fairly minor spoilers from the original Terminator. I will deal only with the first film. I'm not sure if the spoiler statute is up on T2 and I still haven't gotten around to seeing T3.


John Connor is something of a djinn particle himself. To view things from his perspective- He is born to Sarah Connor. She tells him all about the Terminators, SkyNet and his role as a military leader of the humans. She also tells him many things about his father, Reese, a soldier the adult John Connor sends back in time. (This next bit is going just on the probable future shown in the first film) He fails to stop Skynet from unleashing its machines on the world. But, he successfully raises an army. He recognizes a young man named Reese. He tells Reese all about Sarah Connor, ensuring that he falls in love with her. On the eve of Skynet's defeat, it sends a terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor. John Connor sends Reese back, knowing that Reese will impregnate Sarah Connor and become his father.

Thus, John is born only because he exists in the future to send his father to the present where dad will conceive him with mom.


Back To The OP

As far as I can tell, any physical djinn particle would be not only self-created but also infinitely old.

If future Doc, steps out of a time machine and gives a slide rule to present Doc, then present Doc builds a time machine goes back and gives the slide rule to what is now past Doc, completing the cycle and creating a djinn, then hasn't the slide rule been through the cycle an infinite number of times?

If, for the sake of discussion, creation of the time machine takes an hour, and travel in the machine is instantaneous, then when I am first given the slide rule it is an hour old. But if it is an hour old and I have it for another hour before giving it to my past self, it is 2 hours old. But if it is 2 hours old and I have it for another hour before giving it to myself, it is 3 hours old. Ad infinitum.

Am I missing something?

[ntcrawler]

If, for the sake of discussion, creation of the time machine takes an hour, and travel in the machine is instantaneous, then when I am first given the slide rule it is an hour old. But if it is an hour old and I have it for another hour before giving it to my past self, it is 2 hours old. But if it is 2 hours old and I have it for another hour before giving it to myself, it is 3 hours old. Ad infinitum.

Am I missing something?[/QUOTE]


Only if you keep giving yourself the same slide rule, or watch, or artifact, or piece of paper. there is a simple way out of this:

I am sitting here now at my desk. Suddenly, NtCrawler from 2005 appears to me and gives me a watch. So far, in this thread people assumed that I would keep that watch around, wait until 2005, in order to go back in time and give it to myself. But that would make it a djinn. So a simple way to prevent that:

I keep that watch. But before my scheduled depature back in time in 2005, I go out shopping, buy the exact same watch that I already have, and THAT's the watch I use to give to myself. So it's still one watch, with a definite beginning, and a traceable timeline. It's simply a year older when time passes past my departure in 2005. Am I right?

And what would happen if I gave myself the WRONG watch? Well, using Douglas Adams and his Hithhiker writings as a guide, I suppose the universe would implode and recreate itself into something even stranger than before :D

[Chronos]

Addressing both the infinite-age argument and the random-object argument, the best SF writers generally include some form of copying and possibly reinforcement of their djinni. For example, in the afore-mentioned "By His Own Bootstraps", the hero finds a notebook with a primer on the local language written in it. Using this notebook, he learns the language, and goes on to converse with the locals. Eventually, the notebook starts getting a bit dogeared, so he transcribes it into a new one, a task made easier by his now familiarity with the language. Of course, that transcription ends up being the original notebook.