Artifacts that exist only and because of time loops

Factual Questions
61

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?
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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 :smiley:

62

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.