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.
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.
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.
Is a djinn scientifically unsound?? Personally, I think that if time-travel becomes possible, you’d get this sort of thing happening occasionally. 
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.)
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…
[SPOILER]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…[/SPOILER]
Padeye - raining on your parade for 43 years
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).
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.
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.
Man, you’re going to think this is wierd, but I’ve seen this thread before!
This is scary!
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 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.
[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.
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.
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
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. 
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.
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?
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?