Just popping in to say that there will soon be (or, there is already, but soon you’ll hear of it) a musical version of this movie. My friend Doug wrote the music, and it was workshopped in Portland; now they’re reworking it a bit and hope to bring it to Broadway sometime in the future. If you’re a fan of the movie, keep your ears out for it!
Bootstrap paradox. The article even mentions SiT.
I especially like the ones where a time traveler gives a past version of himself a hand-written note (in his own handwriting), then the past version ages into his future self, where he travels back in time and gives his younger self the very same note. Temporal-mechanically speaking, there isn’t any difference from this note and the watch (both have no “connection” to the universe) but the fact that the time traveler “wrote” it, but yet it has no beginning or end, I find especially intriguing.
He goes back in time and during some down time when he’s not seducing Elise, he goes out shopping and buys a watch. He now has two watches. He leaves the new one with her.
Yes, and in an odd omission in that Wikipedia article, the name-inspiration for the paradox(the Heinlein story) does make such a piece of writing important to the plot–but the article doesn’t mention that fact. (As I recall it’s a notebook rather than a single piece of paper.)
The Talk page for the article you linked has a lot of head-scratching discussion, too:
Nitpick: It’s Christopher Reeve, not “Reeves.”