This is by far my favorite paradox and I first encountered it when I was a child playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Song of Storms is taught to you by a man who went mad after hearing you play it in the past.
That was my first though when talking about this paradox. The next would be the compass in Lost. Guess different generation reference different stories, probably younger ones will have other examples
Time machine as jinn is in dark Netflix series, where a character creates a time machine because someone from future gives him blue print for time machine
DBZ Trunks' time machine was a Jinn particle too. Though it was nothing mind boggling as when the present Bulma creates her time machine based off of those blueprints, they understand that she is only recieving the blueprint through Trunks because of his choice to time travel and save Goku, had the clear differences and independencies of both timelines not been presented to us, it would seem like a mind boggling paradox. But since we understand what Trunks did saving Goku did not help his present, all timelines are their own thing, and this doesn't create a loop of Trunks' and Bulmas sharing he gifts of time travel to eachother. you helped prove my point in a comment I made underlining the perceptual inclinations that come with time travel and Jinn particles and how it isn't to be confused that the pendant the elderly woman gave the man, for example, originated from the timeline where she gave it to him. Imagine, he gave it to her a long time ago, now all the sudden she see's the dude time traveling. That's what started this, not some loop where he has always been time traveling - - in her timeline, and the one before that. Although she did know he was a time traveler. This is likely only possible because some writer chose that for their story, and wouldn't actually be the case in the real world.
spoiler alert, a physics teacher from the future came back to this time and spent a few days with Neil. So teachers will be unable to do this until we reach that point in time as what we now see only exists for now. Chuck Berry told me that.
@@L8nitedave I have a spoiler for you, I have done just enough drugs to give me the answer to everything but I can not remember the ingredients. The center of singularity spins at the speed of light, that is why we can not see a Black Hole.
I've also heard this called the Bootstrap Paradox. There's a really good episode of Doctor Who called Before the Flood where Peter Capaldi's 12th doctor gives a brief example (in this case it was Beethoven) of how an idea can be trapped in a time loop. Another example in pop culture that not everybody picks up on is the first Terminator. John Connor sends the soldier Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor from a terminator...and (spoiler) Kyle and Sarah fall in love and Kyle ends up becoming John's father. So here you have an example of a Jinn person; John Connor (at least according to the first movie) exists in this time loop.
Yeah, i came to say about bootstrap (or Ontological) paradox too! As for jon connor, he's not a jinn, but the decision to send kyle is the jinn, as in, connor only sends him cause he knows kyle is the one that went, but there is no original decision to choose him.
@@freekeess9245 About John Connor, my take was that the basic knowledge of how to fight was the Jinn thing. Indeed, Kyle teaches Sarah to be warrior, but he got that from John, who him self got that from his mother Sara.
Also, in Terminator 2 they explain that the Terminator only exists in a time loop. The Terminator was sent back in the 1st movie, and then Cyberdyne uses the Terminator's computer chip and arm to create the Terminator.
And this is why, to this day, I'll argue that the Bill & Ted franchise is the smartest time-traveling series. In the first one they realize that they can set stuff up to break out of jail, after they get out later.... only they don't have to, because they are breaking out of jail now with the setups. The boys grasp the concept that, since they have a time machine, sequences of events no longer have to be done in order and as a result all they have to do is think of a solution and go back and implement it when they eventually get back to the time machine. The thing is they don't have to after they've used their solutions since someone already set them up, perhaps a version of them destroyed upon the creation of the time loop. They take this a step further in the sequel, where the villain tries to use the same exploit to defeat the heroes at the end of the film, only the gun he conjures is a fake set up by the boys. Only the person who eventually wins will get to go back and set things up, and they are going to win, so his plans won't work. In that moment they produced an outcome via sheer thought, as, if you have a time machine, you are a god if you understand the mechanics of time travel.
Potential solution to the Chuck Berry paradox is multiverse theory in that you can’t travel back in time in your own universe, but you can travel back in time to other universes, so a time traveller could take the song from one universe to another.
My favorite example of a jinn particle goes like this: you step outside one day and on your doorstep is a book, you open the book and find out it’s an instruction manual for a Time Machine. You build the machine according to the directions and decide you would go back to the day the book showed up on your doorstep and thank the man who gave you the book. After waiting for a while, nobody came, and you think to yourself “what if I left the book here for myself” and leave the book on your own doorstep. I like this jinn particle because it makes you ask questions like, who wrote the book, and, does time travel through the book, so the more this happens, the older the book gets, and if so, what happens when the book gets so old it is no longer readable, does this loop break?
3:33 Based on the BTTF lore, I don't think there is a pardox with the Chuck Berry song. When you make changes in the past, people cease to exist in the new future, go back and change stuff, and the future is different again. This suggests it's not one time line. When you make a change in the past, the old timeline ceases to exist entirely and a new one is born, with the changes you enacted. That's why people fade away. Using this idea, in Marty's original time line, Chuck Berry wrote the song. Marty goes back in time and changes a bunch of stuff, and the future is changed as a result. This in effect has split off a new time line. In this time line Marty plays the music he learned as written by Chuck Berry in the original time line, but in the new time line Chuck hasn't written it yet, so he is inspired by what he hears, and writes based on that. The timelines are separate, there is no paradox.
This goes to prove that Doc Brown is full of it pretending to be concerned about preserving the timeline but allowing all these changes that benefit Marty and himself.
Marty rewrote it. Since there was 3 years between Marty playing it and the original being recorded and produced. The song was always written and to say that it only exists in this circle is quite whimsical. I expect it out of Hollywood, but this guy pretending to know how time travel works is a bit shameful. But "if you are gunna do something, do it for the clicks".
Exactly, and you can apply that same logic to the pocket watch, in an earlier timeline he didn't travel back because of the watch, but took that watch back with him, he gave it to her and she then gave it him and so on.
Another example is Captain Kirk pawns his antique spectacles in the Star Trek movies. "Those were a gift from Dr. McCoy" "And they will be again; that's the beauty of it"
This is what I was thinking and would like to see as well, because... *Spoilers* ...not only does the whole jinn particle idea exist at the core of the show, the time machine concept that he talks about here figures prominently in it as well.
Okay this bothers me... You can put whatever name you like to it but, what you're talking about is a bootstrap paradox. The term was originally coined by Robert Heinlein in his 1941 short story "By His Bootstraps". It's a very interesting concept, but not one that needs renaming. The bigger question that I would like an astrophysicist to answer is "can a object based 'jinn particle' or 'bootstrap paradox' exist indefinitely if we know that matter will degrade over time due to entropy? Take for instance a time travel loop where a wrist watch is handed from grandfather, to Father, to son then brought back to the grandfather via time travel. This watch is passed down infinitely, but the material composition is finite given the nature of entropy. This implies that there is a definitive end to this time travel loop when the watch finally breaks or degrades to a point where it ceases to function. By the very nature of there being an end of its existence, is there not an implied beginning to its existence? We must give the watchmaker credit at least once before it enters the loop if it has a definitive end to its material components. And does this not imply a linear recursive nature to a 'jinn' object and by extension, time itself?
@ViRiXDreamcore literally had a 3 hour debate about this the other night with a couple friends of mine lol. Taking into account the individual components of the watch degrading at different rates and the work of at least one watch maker to repair it over 'infinite' iterations there is a butterfly effect implied by the watchmaker's time. He may fix the watch one year in one cycle, and 15 years later in the next. Even if the loop goes on forever, the date and time of the repair shifts for the watch maker and therefore each one of those loops must exist in a different dimension than the one before. Unless, by pure chance each component is replaced at the same time in each loop. Given the complexity of a swiss watch (which is what I imagine in this hypothetical) it is extremely unlikely that each gear or winding would fail at the same time in every iteration.
@@X0mbieJesus adding to that, what if trepairing this watch inspires the watchmaker to make a different watch. Or even more interesting, i wonder if there’s a scenario where the watchmaker is inspired by that watch to make… that watch. There would have to be some higher being at play though I’d imagine. Can branching gen particles/bootstraps exist?
The TV show DarK has a time machine that is a Jin particle. It has several Jin particles throughout the show and is my favourite show of all time because of how good it is.
Likewise!! It’s my absolute favorite show of all time too. I came to the comments section to see who mentioned Dark because it is the perfect cinematic example of Jin particle paradoxes, for sure 💯
Dark actually solves the Bootstrap Paradox, which is what this had been called until now. There is an origin point, and it is in fact, technically meta, because the origin point isn't in the timeline that hosts the Jinn itself
In "The Man Who Folded Himself" a 1973 novel by Dave Gerrold (The Trouble with Tribbles), the timebelt is a jinn particle, given to the main character by an elderly man who turns out to be an older version of himself. One of the best time travel novels I've read.
In that novel, every trip into the past creates a new timeline branching from the point that the main character jumps in. The traveler can never return to a timeline they left, they can only create a new timeline similar to one they've been to. The belt DOES have an origin, but it is in a timeline we never visit in the course of the novel.
@@andrewdreasler428 Apparently I need to go back and reread it again. I have either missed the fact that there were new timelines or forgotten it. Thank you for bringing that up.
My favorite version is from an anime. Natsu no Arashi. The plot has ghosts that can go back in time. They find milk that expired 2 months ago. A ghost goes back 2+ months to swap that milk. Then they question how old the milk is. 2 months? 4 months? Infinite months?
When Peter Capaldi played the Doctor in Doctor Who, he started one episode with a Jinn paradox. It's about The Doctor being a fan of Beethoven and he has a complete collection of the Musical manuscripts of all of beethoven's works. So on a whim he goes back in time to meet his hero, but when he gets there nobody has heard of him and he cannot be traced, no matter what he does. So (as you often say) he publishes the manuscripts himself, thus preserving the fact that everyone in modern times (Our Time) can still appreciate Beethoven. In effect he becomes Beethoven. But if the manuscripts already existed in Our timeline - WHO WROTE THEM? The real Beethoven never existed in the actual time that the Doctor visited, and the ones that were published were brought from our timeline and - You already get it. They are Jinn objects. I thought this was an astounding thought when I saw it at the beginning of that episode. Check it out - he explains the paradox so brilliantly, but I'm sorry, but I can't remember which episode it is at the beginning of. Brilliant though.
Moffat used it all the time as a lazy deus ex, it was the entire solution to the end of the universe itself at the end of series 5 and then he just kept using it, and then it's treated as a unique thing in that Beethoven episode. Much respect for the Moff, but he loved his convenient resolutions almost as much as RTD did/does.
@@GCULPEX And there are other movies (and books, I assume, although I don't know) in which a time machine is a Jinn object. Probably the best (because most involved and mind-boggling) is Heinlein's All You Zombies, in which a man is both his own father and his own mother. It was made into the movie Predestination, which someone else mentioned here, in which even another layer was added.
And then there's Fry from Futurama, who went back in time to become his own grandfather. Which I just now realize both is and isn't a "grandfather paradox".
@@onidaaitsubasa4177 Yes, right! If someone were to write the story of the Jinn-guitar, then it would cease to be an anachronism. C'mon Zemeckis & Gale - get to work!
@@CheeseWyrm The story was never about Marty saving his parents' marriage, but the time travellers he encountered along the way. The Flux Capacitor. There is no such thing _now._ But in the future there will be one in the past. It all makes sense now! Tenet is a sequel to Back to the Future!
Suppose you consider the original Chuck as Chuck 1, pre McFly, HE wrote the song in HIS past, which McFly hears in his (McFly) present and Chuck 1's future (he probably dead by then). When McFly goes into the past, he is creating a new present and future for Chuck, now Chuck 2, essentially in an alternate timeline. So when he plays the song that Chuck2 hears, he is essentially creating a new future in an alternate timeline that branches off when he travels into an alternate past where Chuck is yet to write that song. Even if it was in the same universe, a loop has to have a starting point, and the starting point for this loop is "original" Chuck Writing the song the McFly gets to hear for him to then travel back into the past and then start the loop. In this case, the loop ends when McFly goes back to his future, having changed the past to now read that Chuck heard someone play that song. In that case, Only he would know that Chuck is the one who really wrote the song.
Interestingly, at the time of Back to the Future (1985), Chuck Berry was alive & rockin'. He passed in 2017, so he was still present for the 2015 of BttF 2 & 3 :) Hail, hail Rock'n'Roll!
@@gameingpro2333That can't be the case. Marty traveling back in time changed a lot of things about the past, leading to him returning to an alternate present, which includes Chuck Berry technically being inspired by Marty. The original timeline, George Mcfly took Lorraine to the Under the Sea dance and Marvin performed a time appropriate set
This makes me wonder about decay in Jinn... elements, I guess? Because if it's, say, a perishable piece of food, time loops around it, but it's the same piece of food going around and around in that loop. If it's an idea, like a song or a recipe or a poem or something, we can't possibly perfectly replicate whatever idea we perceived to replicate to continue the loop, so it seems to leave a certain amount of room for a broken telephone scenario. The only way I could think this wouldn't happen is if Marty's inevitable slight deviations from the original song were somehow perfectly counteracted by Marvin's inevitable slight deviations, passing it between the two 'versions' of the song in the time loop
On Dr. Who, this was referred to as "The Bootstrap Paradox". There was an episode of a TV anthology, which featured an Elvis impersonater who traveled back in time, and replaced real Elvis.
Steven Moffat used to abuse this bootstrap paradox all the time as resolutions to episodes during his time as showrunner of Doctor Who. Only he could turn such a cool idea into a constant deus ex (still the best writer the show's ever had).
@@leonlaird_ I quite love Douglas Adams's work on the show. Although he was only credited with one completed story, I definitely see his influence on the work done during his tenure as script editor.
It's been covered by countless people. It's an ontological paradox, also called a bootstrap paradox. They exist in countless time travel media, from LOST to the films mentioned here. Nothing new.
Chuck is the grounding person, he brings everything back to today’s reality. Only Chuck looks at a couple of people stalking each other, instead of looking at it as two people uniquely connected in love and in this loop. No no that’s not it, they’re stalking each other. Good one Chuck.
You can solve two paradoxes at once, this jin particle one can be solved with ship of thesius. Take the locket for example, if it is the same locket, that means it has existed for an infinite amount of time. It is bound to get dropped or scratched or just damaged from existing. So, as the parts are replaced, the pieces that broke off dont continue to time travel and the parts that are added arent jin particles. I dont know if i explained it well but i hope that makes sense
07:15 A Time Machine that is itself a Jinn Particle is the plot of Isaac Asimov's "The End of Eternity". Eternity is a time "elevator" (you go up floors to go forward in time, down to go back in time), and its creation was possible because one of its technicians went back in time with the knowledge on how to build it.
@@JustSomeRandomMusicFanI just learned that Foundation was from Isaac Asimov. Its one of my favorite shows the world building is amazing, plus I believe that psychohistory is actually possible today with enough data and computing power we might be able to predict at least something. But it wont be a small quantum computer like Hari has, probably a lot if data and AI centers combined
I think earlier is Lester Del Rey's "and it comes out here" written in 1951 (although he actually wrote it 30 years later and sent it back to himself). m.gutenberg.org/files/51046/51046-h/51046-h.htm
I wish they asked the question "what happens when the locket breaks?" because it eventually has to since it's not being renewed in any way. Or "what happens when the song slowly changes more and more through the loop until it's something radically different?" because they're reciting it through memory so it can't be 100% perfect every time
The song could correct itself if both persons misremembers it and it results in the correct song being sung by one or both of them. In this case there is no correct song just different interpretations/versions for each time period. The locket's battery would die or the locket would get destroyed eventually because of entropy.
@@thekaxmax Incorrect. The locket has a perpetual loop timeline that it exists in. It is the same locket that goes to the future through normal time, gets given to him, and then gets given to her back in the past. Meaning each time it goes through the loop, it ages by 60 years. It will eventually break or wear down.
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR NEIL TO TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN FOR YEARS. I remembered he had a name for theoretical objects that are bound within loops of time, and that he used a baseball as an example, but couldn't find it with any amount of searching. Let's hope this time I don't forget
@@Noneomg What cult are you a member of, then? (You must be a member of a cult yourself to be so randomly offended that someone else might like something you don't. Normal rational people just don't care. But for you to care so deeply, it must be because you're a member of the Jesus Death Cult or something similar to that, and so the fact that other people don't worship the same object of worship that you do, kind of irks you.)
We had a time lap discussian in time travel in physics class: You build a time machine, travel back and will reach the time you build a time machine you travel back with.
6:53 -- "those are the two most interesting examples of it" -- he's either never seen or has forgotten about "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" -- the lost keys, the fax, the garbage can ... -- what was wild is that Ted even explains the loop when he creates it
9:05 But when a voltage is applied across the plates, an electric field is generated between them. This field can be described by the electric flux. In a capacitor, the flux represents the total number of electric field lines passing through the area between the plates.
In the original movie, yes, but as they expanded the series they altered the time travel rules. From T2 we learned that T1 created a new timeline. This means that while John's father is the same, the rest of the events are not. That would mean that the events that lead to the existence of the old John Connor of T1 are not the same that led to the young John Connor of T2. My guess is that there is a timeline without John Connor in which for whatever reason Skynet had to send a Terminator to the past and Reese was sent to stop it. This created John Connor, altering the reason why Reese was sent while a loop of slightly different timelines in which John sends Reese were created.
@@MattCanev419 yeah, although in Back to the future we don't see other timelines (there is only one in which he is rich), the idea would be the same. One would guess that while the first time Biff went back with the Almanac because he saw an opportunity, in the next go he will time travel because he knows that's what he has to do. The timeline may even stay that way until another time traveler interferes.
On behalf of all Rick and Morty fans I'm offended! Ricks _don't do time travel!_ * spoilers * That was an alternate reality Rick visiting Rick (currently inventing portal travel) offering Rick the invention! Rick refuses and evil Rick kills Rick's wife! That's the origin story! Tsk tsk!
Thank you! I scrolled down through the comments JUST to see if someone else had said it before I did. Had to scroll too far. Also, the time travel stuff box is an intentional object as a reminder that they SHELVED the whole idea of Time Travel. Rick doesn't respect time travel. It's also the reason a lot of people are already annoyed with the anime version being time traveled focused. Also, regardless of whether he does or does not time travel in the show in general, it doesn't change the fact that the specific scene mentioned isn't a time travel scene.
I didn't know this phenomenon had a name. My mother and grandmother LOVED Somewhere in Time. I remember twins year old me blowing their minds with this paradox.
I have a feeling that if you're not careful with time travel then you wind up having a whole bunch of people remembering that something was different even though it never was cause their memory event happened in the prior timeline before the time traveler went back and changed things.
So, on the specific episode that Chuck mentions with Rick and Morty, that origin story is not actually time travel. Rick explicitly states multiple times throughout the series that he DOES NOT mess with time travel (because the series has "Time Police," its a whole thing), and Rick's portal gun is strictly ONLY alternate-universe travel. So, instead of Rick learning how to make his portal gun from a future version of his own timeline, he is actually being told by a Rick from a parallel world who has an entirely different history and timeline than "our" Rick. So in that case, there is no "closed loop" happening there, like with all of the other examples. An example to showcase what the episode is basically doing would be if you decided to send this video idea to an alternate version of yourself that hasn't had this idea yet, say a version of you that lives in a world where the Nazis won WW2, then you quickly hop back to our original world. That short trip doesn't change our world's history to match up with the "Nazis Winning" world, nor does it change the "Nazis World's" past to all of a sudden change the winner to the allies. And it doesn't cause a "time loop" to occur, since you don't have multiple different pasts that you personally remember in order to make that sort of time loop possible, though if you do simultaneously remember the allies both winning and losing WW2 in history class, I'd get your brain checked out by a doctor for those memory issues. Either that, or there would have to be some sort of memory modification going on which would just be out of scope for what we are trying to discuss. That all being said, I have since stopped watching the series after season 5-6 or something, they're on at least 7 now I think, so it is possible they've ret-con-ed the events in a newer episode I haven't seen, but even so I highly doubt that they would break their own established "rules" for their world's fictional logic like that.
Dear Neil & Chuck, great episode as always. Would like to mention what are probably the ur-examples: “-All you Zombies-“ the short story (1958) by the late great Robert A. Heinlein, also filmed as the Indie film starring Ethan Hawke & Sarah Snook, “Predestination” (2014). “By his Bootstraps” (1941), novella, also by Robert A. Heinlein On the latter, Carl Sagan and David Lewis have commented on the way science fiction can deliver complex info to a reader, and the “perfectly consistent” nature of time travel as described in-story On the former, the twist is too good to spoil in the off chance you haven’t read it
I believe in the doc's explanation of time in Back to the Future 2, where changing the past creates an alternate timeline. So in that case Jinn particles aren't a thing. In Marty's original timeline, Chuck Barry wrote the song, but as soon as Marty went back in time, he created a new timeline in which he created the song.
So, how and "when" did Marty hear and learn the song? If Chuck Barry wrote it in the original timeline and Marty played it in the past, how was the song created then? the song is the Jinn
@@rocknwatkins, the original timeline may not really be the original when it has been altered by the changes made by the events of what Marty has done in the past, multiple branches probably have been created. but the song, the Jinn, remains in the loop on all possible realities. 🤔 my head now hurts
@@justsoirritatedsoilaugh no, it's not. Chuck wrote the song, marty changed stuff, then he didn't. There's no 'loop' or repeating cause, because marty recalls the original. Back to the future was just a bad choice, because time travel doesn't work that way here...
@@KeithElliott-zd8cx temporal paradox. Marty did change his future. it caused a butterfly effect where the events from the past that Marty has altered, have changed the lives of his parents, their family, and Biff. the song was still there. It was still written by Chuck Berry. or is it? 🤔😂
In "Somewhere in Time" would the object (the jewellery) wither over time or not Coz it is moving back and forth in time but from the jewellery's perspective it is just changing hands and moving forward in time
From Chuck's perspective, Marty wrote "Johnny B. Goode." But, from Marty's perspective Chuck is the author. Thus the causal paradox. However, from the viewer's perspective (us watching the movie), it's clear Chuck wrote "Johnny B. Goode." There has to be some time-independent interpretation of the sequence of events that avoids the paradox.
yes and no. There's weird time travel mechanics sometimes, but back to the future, it's clearly alterable. Chuck wrote it 'the first time', marty changed things. It's a bad example of this.
6:09 I think they're thinking about this incorrectly. Neither Marty or Superman went back in time. What they actually did was move into another time stream that was positioned further back than their original time stream. And that time stream was so analogous to their original timestream that they couldn't tell the difference. But once they entered into the new time stream they brought an object from one timestream into the other time stream. And so that object did have an origin. But it's origin is not from the second time stream, it's from the first time stream. And so in the second time stream it's an illusion that it's jinn object but it does have an origin in the original time stream.
That works for the Back to the Future example but not the Time after Time one. How could she give him the locket in the future if he didn’t give it to her in the past?
Another issue with time travel in movies is their purpose for using it. If you go back in time to change something, then it removes the reason to go back in time in the first place. Without the reason, you never go back in time to change it. Since you don't go back in time to change it, it stays the thing that gives you a reason to go back in time.
Yes I was thinking about this specifically with the time machine example they use. If there's no one present in the loop who built it. Then no one can repair it when it inevitably breaks. It then can't travel to continue the loop. So a paradox occurs where it isn't able to meet it's pre-destination's existence. Something like a watch could be repaired or restored (it would cause a break in the loop to some extent but hypothetically the loop could continue as it had before it was repaired) which then gets into the whole Ship of Theseus concept.
Nope. Whatever damage it accrued will be repaired by the time it goes back. It's a product of time. It will never break or degrade. It is stuck in a time loop with no beginning or end. Did you even listen to the video? No you didn't. Idiots.
But thats assuming the object is still subject to the aging/rusting process we know in reg time. Rusting/aging away would still have the particles just existing though technically if it did..
Not really a paradox if you think about it, according to everything we know time is relative to the observer and their speed, surroundings, and mass etc. So that literally means if you go backward in time there is 2 basic realistic options. 1 you de-age and become younger with the reverse flow of time, or 2 you somehow actually step out of and go to a different time coordinate but in reality it's not really you moving through time you've stepped outside of it. So if you step outside of time you'd deviate things simply by changing events just by breathing, but in the case of the song Chuck Berry would have ended up writing a different song inspired by Johnny B Goode. However, Marvin Berry would've also been cited as a major inspiration as well because he found the sound that inspired Chuck Berry. Many variables change the whole plot changes. It is inevitable, and black holes kind of prove that nothing suspect would happen because they are intermixing all the time and space they can all over the universe.
I like to think of these kinds of paradoxes as ultimately boiling down to the question "What is the start of a circle"? Not a circle that is drawn on a page mind you, but the very mathematical concept. And if course the answer is a circle has neither begining nor end, it simply is. Under the above then, your explanation would be that there are no circles but instead only spirals. Where you can never make it back perfectly to the begining. Which is another alternative.
Random Idea for a film: Record Plot would revolve around the main character in a room with a VCR. There is also an antigravity robot that assists the main character by answering questions, providing company and selecting the tapes to be played. The main character is tasked by scientists to replay one tape several times every day. Each day the main character leaves, only to return and view another tape. The VRC itself is anomalous. It operates with any compatible tape, but once playback begins, it cannot be paused, stopped, rewound, fast-forwarded, or altered in speed. The tape plays linearly from beginning to end, adhering strictly to its natural runtime. During the first few plays, the contents of the tape unfold as expected, adhering to the events and sequences recorded. However, as the tape is replayed repeatedly, Denizens within the recording-be they people, animals, or other entities-begin to develop awareness of the repeating cycle. With each loop, an increasing number of denizens retain their memories, creating a growing sense of déjà vu that escalates into outright awareness of their entrapment within a loop. This awareness fundamentally disrupts the fabric of the recorded world, giving rise to confusion, rebellion, and eventually, social collapse. If no sentient beings are present within the recording, the environment itself "awakens", gaining sentience and self-awareness. This leads to the spontaneous emergence of new entities within the recording, birthed from the fabric of the environment itself. If the recording consists of a black screen with no audio, the tape's playback initiates a "big bang" event on the screen. A sudden eruption of light and sound occurs, followed by the rapid development of a new universe, complete with its own rules of physics and life. This new universe quickly progresses to a state of equilibrium before the tape resets and the event begins anew. Each tape that is played represents a form of visual media recording, such as a movie, television show, home video, music video or otherwise. For each tape the main character documents the changes and reports to the robot. As the film goes on, the main character becomes increasingly paranoid of the camera's in the room. Eventually the main character stops watching the recording altogether, because they themselves realize that they are in a recorded time loop. The main character goes absolutely insane from this revelation. As you may have guessed, the main character is a recorded version of another character. The one who was once recorded is replaying the recording of the previous day on the VCR. The narrative day that was passing in the tape was actually a loop. In the first playing's of this recording, the robot just gave the same tape to the main character, but eventually gained awareness and started giving them different tapes(Where the film begins). The main character's "original" then asks the original robot if they themselves are in a recording and the film ends while leaving it open to interpretation. I'm not using that one you can just have it.
Film Name: Watchers btw it's gotta be like a 10hr long film or something 😂 no way I'm getting full enjoyment out of it if this concept is only explored for 120 minutes or make it a series!
Regarding "Somewhere In Time": The stalking itself is a Jinn particle. There's no indication that the Chris Reeves character would have stalked anyone if he hadn't himself been stalked -- which only happened because of the time travel.
Here's my time travel paradox - a supercomputer that can read your brain waves and is connected to the internet can act faster than you are consciously able to recognize your own thoughts - think high frequency trading - but a supercomputer meant to beat you before you even know it consciously.
I disagree there are plenty of situations where this has been brought up in my friend group and the biggest factor to think about for this would be if you where to do something unpredictable so many times it would in theory end up counteracting its constantly thinking fast there fore being 1 step ahead” and so yes for a period of time or until u end up doing unpredictable things it’ll be ahead until you do become “unpredictable” if you will.
I imagine the paradox as a spiral loop: an artist creates a song, the song is taken back in time to before it was created, and the artist is inspired by the song, which creates an alternative reality, which can then progress into the time loop. The inspiration from hearing the song may form variations of the complete song until the point at which the heard inspiration will always inspire the perfect match of the final song.
Another question for the locket. The locket is a physical object that is trapped in a time loop. it keeps getting passed on. Will it degrade over time? Because from the locket's perspective, it just keeps on travelling back and forth past future past future etc, getting "old"
Question: Will the locket ever grow older within the Jinn loop? The song will always be there but will something that is materialistic that can grow old, will it do so in the jinn loop? For the locket will it ever rust, time slow down, so working? Or will it do the opposite?
I read a supposition at one time explaining that once a time machine is created, it cannot be destroyed by the very nature of how they work. There was an entire story based around that - where the creator had to learn to access the entity without the controls once their physical version was damaged.
I can think of one simple explanation for these. The Chuck Berry one is simple, he would have written that song anyway, Marty went back sang it before Chuck originally wrote it, so Chuck heard it and sang it, then Marty heard chuck perform it and the loop went from there. The pocket watch was not originally why he went back in time, He may have met her and and learnt about her life and wanted to go back and meet the younger her, he bought the pocket watch as one of the old things (his cloths etc) that he took back with him, gave her the pocket watch which she then gave him and that's how that loop began. The other one is Terminator, John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to save Sarah Connor, Kyle sleeps with Sarah and Sarah has a son who turns out to be a boy who she names John who sends Kyle back to be his father. Simple, Sarah had a son at some point in time and names him John, John sends Kyle back to save Sarah, they have a son whom she names John and raises him to be that John and that loop goes on. You can apply this to any such time travel paradox.
Need to watch Somewhere in Time again! Wasn't it a watch? It was my 1st thought when you revealed the idea of the paradox. Great soundtrack by John Barry
Jinn partical time machine was done in the Nexflix series called "Dark" (which is a fantastic show BTW) and was executed amazingly. It's a must watch 3 season show If you are in to time travel.
Ray Bradbury wrote a story named “The Toynbee Convector”. It had a similar loop, but with a _primer_ : A man makes a fake timeship and a detailed model of a futuristic city, films it, then tells everyone he traveled to the future and this is how great it’s going to be. People believe him and are inspired to create that future, in which they invent that timeship and retcon the whole thing into reality.
I think part of the "problem" is our assumption that everything happens on a "line." If time really is the 4th dimension, all possibilities happen concurrently, so there's a non-zero chance that these kinds of things don't exist in a "loop" so much as traversing across different levels of existence. Like with the BttF reference. There's one timeline where Marty learns the song from the radio. There's a timeline where Chuck Barry learns the song from a "mysterious stranger," but out story touches across both. But we see it as a single event line, because we lack the ability to perceive the other permutations that are constantly branching out from any one moment. Simplification of what I'm getting at. Time exists as an "ocean" of every possibility that could exist, and our timeline is just a current moving through those possibilities. When you involve time travel, it's no different than throwing a rock (or a boulder) into that current. Things get "wonky" as it tries to correct itself.
Okay, big fan of Back to the Future, and despite your denial of the Flux Capacitor, loved this. Also a big fan of the time travel genre, and so I know of multiple examples of the Jinn Particle. (My favorite was in Asimov 's Science Fiction Magazine. Forget title/author, but a man has himself show up with a time machine. He fixes the time machine (missing wire) and so winds up going to his previous self, to get the time machine fixed, instigating the loop, because the wire keeps disappearing every time the machine travels in time.)
There is another layer of paradox on Jinn particles: Radioactive Decay The case of the song works as the knowledge was transferred from one set of neurons to another. But with the locket, it is the same physical item. If the locket is experiencing this infinite time, then it will have fully undergone radioactive decay long before its handed to anyone. But if it decayed, it would never be handed over, meaning that the time loop is broken. There are a few possibilities here to resolve this 1. Every iteration of the item's experience through the time loop is slightly different as a result of fewer and fewer of its atoms remaining, but with only minimal effects at first, but eventually reaching a critical point where the timeline varies greatly, literally spiraling the loop until the object is no longer handed to the next person. The implications of this would involve multiple timelines existing and running in parallel. 2. A Jinn particle only exists within a time loop where all of its atoms remain. (The longer the loop, the less likely for the Jinn particle to exist). This would also imply that radioactive decay is deterministic and as a result of external rather than internal forces (think Laplace's Demon) 3. We have a feaux Jinn particle, replaced during the time loop (e.g. the woman buys a new matching locket during her life to replace the old one, and then gives that one to the man)
Just a sudden thought/question I have about time travel: Since space and time are linked, when time traveling shouldn't one also need to think of where the space would be when they traveled through time, not just on earth but where earth would be in the solar system and where the solar system would be in the galaxy?
This is by far my favorite paradox and I first encountered it when I was a child playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Song of Storms is taught to you by a man who went mad after hearing you play it in the past.
Great reference
I also played that game as a kid.
I was thinking about this particular paradox too, my favorite instance of this scenario
That was my first though when talking about this paradox. The next would be the compass in Lost. Guess different generation reference different stories, probably younger ones will have other examples
Exactly, we've definitely heard of this. Praise be to Zelda.
I think the show Dark explores this concept pretty well in the first 2 seasons
Actually the series finale is all about it.
Awesome show, even dubbed as I'm English, one of the best concepts and time travel shows!
I just commented the same thing, my favourite series.
That show was such a mind f**k .
Wheres the show on?
Time machine as jinn is in dark Netflix series, where a character creates a time machine because someone from future gives him blue print for time machine
Nikola Tesla had made a blueprint however lacked the funds to build one.
everything was kind of a jinn particle in that series it hurts my head the more i think about em
DBZ Trunks' time machine was a Jinn particle too. Though it was nothing mind boggling as when the present Bulma creates her time machine based off of those blueprints, they understand that she is only recieving the blueprint through Trunks because of his choice to time travel and save Goku, had the clear differences and independencies of both timelines not been presented to us, it would seem like a mind boggling paradox. But since we understand what Trunks did saving Goku did not help his present, all timelines are their own thing, and this doesn't create a loop of Trunks' and Bulmas sharing he gifts of time travel to eachother.
you helped prove my point in a comment I made underlining the perceptual inclinations that come with time travel and Jinn particles and how it isn't to be confused that the pendant the elderly woman gave the man, for example, originated from the timeline where she gave it to him. Imagine, he gave it to her a long time ago, now all the sudden she see's the dude time traveling. That's what started this, not some loop where he has always been time traveling - - in her timeline, and the one before that. Although she did know he was a time traveler. This is likely only possible because some writer chose that for their story, and wouldn't actually be the case in the real world.
I love it when Neil uses films or pop culture references to teach us things. More teachers should attempt this style
That man has reached to teach more minds than Einstein.
spoiler alert, a physics teacher from the future came back to this time and spent a few days with Neil. So teachers will be unable to do this until we reach that point in time as what we now see only exists for now. Chuck Berry told me that.
@@L8nitedave I have a spoiler for you, I have done just enough drugs to give me the answer to everything but I can not remember the ingredients. The center of singularity spins at the speed of light, that is why we can not see a Black Hole.
But he’s a fraud and a self-promoter. He’s never actually worked in the field of science.
I've also heard this called the Bootstrap Paradox. There's a really good episode of Doctor Who called Before the Flood where Peter Capaldi's 12th doctor gives a brief example (in this case it was Beethoven) of how an idea can be trapped in a time loop.
Another example in pop culture that not everybody picks up on is the first Terminator. John Connor sends the soldier Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor from a terminator...and (spoiler) Kyle and Sarah fall in love and Kyle ends up becoming John's father. So here you have an example of a Jinn person; John Connor (at least according to the first movie) exists in this time loop.
Yeah, i came to say about bootstrap (or Ontological) paradox too!
As for jon connor, he's not a jinn, but the decision to send kyle is the jinn, as in, connor only sends him cause he knows kyle is the one that went, but there is no original decision to choose him.
Named after the Robert Heinlein story, "By His Bootstraps."
@@freekeess9245 About John Connor, my take was that the basic knowledge of how to fight was the Jinn thing. Indeed, Kyle teaches Sarah to be warrior, but he got that from John, who him self got that from his mother Sara.
Also, in Terminator 2 they explain that the Terminator only exists in a time loop. The Terminator was sent back in the 1st movie, and then Cyberdyne uses the Terminator's computer chip and arm to create the Terminator.
@@Bunell5090 Good point
And this is why, to this day, I'll argue that the Bill & Ted franchise is the smartest time-traveling series. In the first one they realize that they can set stuff up to break out of jail, after they get out later.... only they don't have to, because they are breaking out of jail now with the setups. The boys grasp the concept that, since they have a time machine, sequences of events no longer have to be done in order and as a result all they have to do is think of a solution and go back and implement it when they eventually get back to the time machine. The thing is they don't have to after they've used their solutions since someone already set them up, perhaps a version of them destroyed upon the creation of the time loop. They take this a step further in the sequel, where the villain tries to use the same exploit to defeat the heroes at the end of the film, only the gun he conjures is a fake set up by the boys. Only the person who eventually wins will get to go back and set things up, and they are going to win, so his plans won't work. In that moment they produced an outcome via sheer thought, as, if you have a time machine, you are a god if you understand the mechanics of time travel.
Potential solution to the Chuck Berry paradox is multiverse theory in that you can’t travel back in time in your own universe, but you can travel back in time to other universes, so a time traveller could take the song from one universe to another.
The Rick and Morty method of “time travel”.
Imagine a Beatles Greatest Hits album where you've never heard any of the songs in this universe.
But when you're on the other universe, and you go back in time again, can that happen in your own, original universe?
@@metalzonemt-2 "...hoping that his next leap will be the leap home." -- Quantum Leap, but across time AND universes
Question is is if you go back to your own time do you end up in your own universe instead of a separate offshoot in the multiverse
Predestination - A movie about a Jinn human. Very brain bending.
I was about to mention it.
Near after the beginning I figured what was going on, but then they decided to twist it way further more.
Awesome movie
Jinn human is confusing in this movie great tho it is. But to be the mother and father of yourself needs a Niel & Chuck explanation 😁
First movie that came to mind.
From the novelette 'All You Zombies'
My favorite example of a jinn particle goes like this: you step outside one day and on your doorstep is a book, you open the book and find out it’s an instruction manual for a Time Machine. You build the machine according to the directions and decide you would go back to the day the book showed up on your doorstep and thank the man who gave you the book. After waiting for a while, nobody came, and you think to yourself “what if I left the book here for myself” and leave the book on your own doorstep.
I like this jinn particle because it makes you ask questions like, who wrote the book, and, does time travel through the book, so the more this happens, the older the book gets, and if so, what happens when the book gets so old it is no longer readable, does this loop break?
1:46 my favourite part of startalk is when chuck makes Neil laugh so hard they have to cut to let Neil gather himself
Me too! I love it! 😆
I drank too much gin once, and time traveled to the floor.😂
😂😂
The only difference between gin and Djinn is the style of the bottle...
That’s Jinn travel
Lol
Thats more scientific method than the black DEI hire has practiced
3:33 Based on the BTTF lore, I don't think there is a pardox with the Chuck Berry song. When you make changes in the past, people cease to exist in the new future, go back and change stuff, and the future is different again. This suggests it's not one time line. When you make a change in the past, the old timeline ceases to exist entirely and a new one is born, with the changes you enacted. That's why people fade away. Using this idea, in Marty's original time line, Chuck Berry wrote the song. Marty goes back in time and changes a bunch of stuff, and the future is changed as a result. This in effect has split off a new time line. In this time line Marty plays the music he learned as written by Chuck Berry in the original time line, but in the new time line Chuck hasn't written it yet, so he is inspired by what he hears, and writes based on that. The timelines are separate, there is no paradox.
And the answer as to who wrote it is Chuck Berry in Marty's original timeline.
This goes to prove that Doc Brown is full of it pretending to be concerned about preserving the timeline but allowing all these changes that benefit Marty and himself.
Yes. 100%. I just came to the comments to post this myself but Im glad to see other people like you have corrected it first.
Marty rewrote it. Since there was 3 years between Marty playing it and the original being recorded and produced. The song was always written and to say that it only exists in this circle is quite whimsical. I expect it out of Hollywood, but this guy pretending to know how time travel works is a bit shameful. But "if you are gunna do something, do it for the clicks".
Exactly, and you can apply that same logic to the pocket watch, in an earlier timeline he didn't travel back because of the watch, but took that watch back with him, he gave it to her and she then gave it him and so on.
Another example is Captain Kirk pawns his antique spectacles in the Star Trek movies. "Those were a gift from Dr. McCoy" "And they will be again; that's the beauty of it"
Second reference same movie…Scotty gives away the formula for transparent aluminum!
@@shawnseler7897 ...but who's to say that this guy I'm giving the formula to isn't the person who invented it?
❤Hello Computer ❤
In the DC comic, Checkov obsesses over this to BONES who therefore tells him: "You've been spending too much time with Spock." 8:05
@@adamregula4328ah the keyboard, how quaint. 😂
I would love to see Dr Tyson review the tv show DARK
This is what I was thinking and would like to see as well, because...
*Spoilers*
...not only does the whole jinn particle idea exist at the core of the show, the time machine concept that he talks about here figures prominently in it as well.
Me too ✋️
Dark is a freakin amazing show
True @@livelikeno0ther
YES PLEASE!!!
Okay this bothers me... You can put whatever name you like to it but, what you're talking about is a bootstrap paradox. The term was originally coined by Robert Heinlein in his 1941 short story "By His Bootstraps". It's a very interesting concept, but not one that needs renaming. The bigger question that I would like an astrophysicist to answer is "can a object based 'jinn particle' or 'bootstrap paradox' exist indefinitely if we know that matter will degrade over time due to entropy? Take for instance a time travel loop where a wrist watch is handed from grandfather, to Father, to son then brought back to the grandfather via time travel. This watch is passed down infinitely, but the material composition is finite given the nature of entropy. This implies that there is a definitive end to this time travel loop when the watch finally breaks or degrades to a point where it ceases to function. By the very nature of there being an end of its existence, is there not an implied beginning to its existence? We must give the watchmaker credit at least once before it enters the loop if it has a definitive end to its material components. And does this not imply a linear recursive nature to a 'jinn' object and by extension, time itself?
Good point! This is why I say the many worlds theory is at play….
Also, another copy of this very watch exists…. Somewhere, probably at a shop.
@ViRiXDreamcore literally had a 3 hour debate about this the other night with a couple friends of mine lol. Taking into account the individual components of the watch degrading at different rates and the work of at least one watch maker to repair it over 'infinite' iterations there is a butterfly effect implied by the watchmaker's time. He may fix the watch one year in one cycle, and 15 years later in the next. Even if the loop goes on forever, the date and time of the repair shifts for the watch maker and therefore each one of those loops must exist in a different dimension than the one before. Unless, by pure chance each component is replaced at the same time in each loop. Given the complexity of a swiss watch (which is what I imagine in this hypothetical) it is extremely unlikely that each gear or winding would fail at the same time in every iteration.
@@X0mbieJesus adding to that, what if trepairing this watch inspires the watchmaker to make a different watch. Or even more interesting, i wonder if there’s a scenario where the watchmaker is inspired by that watch to make… that watch. There would have to be some higher being at play though I’d imagine.
Can branching gen particles/bootstraps exist?
@@ViRiXDreamcore Infinite Regress. Turtles all the way down.
The TV show DarK has a time machine that is a Jin particle. It has several Jin particles throughout the show and is my favourite show of all time because of how good it is.
Dark is so amazing.
Likewise!! It’s my absolute favorite show of all time too. I came to the comments section to see who mentioned Dark because it is the perfect cinematic example of Jin particle paradoxes, for sure 💯
Mine too 😊 Dark is just genius.
Oooo. I just learned about Jinn particles and I love Dark! A new perspective to watch it from!
Dark actually solves the Bootstrap Paradox, which is what this had been called until now. There is an origin point, and it is in fact, technically meta, because the origin point isn't in the timeline that hosts the Jinn itself
In "The Man Who Folded Himself" a 1973 novel by Dave Gerrold (The Trouble with Tribbles), the timebelt is a jinn particle, given to the main character by an elderly man who turns out to be an older version of himself. One of the best time travel novels I've read.
I read this as a teen, and loved it enough to reread it multiple times, and recommend it to countless people.
Thanks for the recommend! 🎉
In that novel, every trip into the past creates a new timeline branching from the point that the main character jumps in.
The traveler can never return to a timeline they left, they can only create a new timeline similar to one they've been to.
The belt DOES have an origin, but it is in a timeline we never visit in the course of the novel.
@@andrewdreasler428
Apparently I need to go back and reread it again. I have either missed the fact that there were new timelines or forgotten it.
Thank you for bringing that up.
@@jacobwenzel5338 YES
My favorite version is from an anime. Natsu no Arashi. The plot has ghosts that can go back in time. They find milk that expired 2 months ago. A ghost goes back 2+ months to swap that milk. Then they question how old the milk is. 2 months? 4 months? Infinite months?
When Peter Capaldi played the Doctor in Doctor Who, he started one episode with a Jinn paradox. It's about The Doctor being a fan of Beethoven and he has a complete collection of the Musical manuscripts of all of beethoven's works. So on a whim he goes back in time to meet his hero, but when he gets there nobody has heard of him and he cannot be traced, no matter what he does. So (as you often say) he publishes the manuscripts himself, thus preserving the fact that everyone in modern times (Our Time) can still appreciate Beethoven. In effect he becomes Beethoven. But if the manuscripts already existed in Our timeline - WHO WROTE THEM? The real Beethoven never existed in the actual time that the Doctor visited, and the ones that were published were brought from our timeline and - You already get it. They are Jinn objects. I thought this was an astounding thought when I saw it at the beginning of that episode. Check it out - he explains the paradox so brilliantly, but I'm sorry, but I can't remember which episode it is at the beginning of. Brilliant though.
Before The Flood, S9 E4.
Web search: "capaldi who beetoven"
The Tardis(') is a jinn object, the largest of all.
Moffat used it all the time as a lazy deus ex, it was the entire solution to the end of the universe itself at the end of series 5 and then he just kept using it, and then it's treated as a unique thing in that Beethoven episode. Much respect for the Moff, but he loved his convenient resolutions almost as much as RTD did/does.
The Bootstrap Paradox.
@@GCULPEX And there are other movies (and books, I assume, although I don't know) in which a time machine is a Jinn object.
Probably the best (because most involved and mind-boggling) is Heinlein's All You Zombies, in which a man is both his own father and his own mother. It was made into the movie Predestination, which someone else mentioned here, in which even another layer was added.
And then there's Fry from Futurama, who went back in time to become his own grandfather. Which I just now realize both is and isn't a "grandfather paradox".
Yeah, he tried to prevent one, made a different kind of one.
Hay that was an accident, I didn't know she was my grandmother till after the fact.....😂
The Robert Heinlein short story "By His Own Bootstraps" is about this.
That's why its called bootstrap paradox
Marty's 1955 performance also pre-dates the 1958 introduction of the Gibson ES-345 guitar he is playing.
Which is more of a gaffe, since the guitar wasn't something he brought back with him. Good catch.
@@stellijer Hmm, I feel like there's some kind of additional time travel story behind that guitar now
@@onidaaitsubasa4177 Yes, right! If someone were to write the story of the Jinn-guitar, then it would cease to be an anachronism. C'mon Zemeckis & Gale - get to work!
@@CheeseWyrm The story was never about Marty saving his parents' marriage, but the time travellers he encountered along the way. The Flux Capacitor. There is no such thing _now._ But in the future there will be one in the past. It all makes sense now! Tenet is a sequel to Back to the Future!
Nerd
Suppose you consider the original Chuck as Chuck 1, pre McFly, HE wrote the song in HIS past, which McFly hears in his (McFly) present and Chuck 1's future (he probably dead by then).
When McFly goes into the past, he is creating a new present and future for Chuck, now Chuck 2, essentially in an alternate timeline.
So when he plays the song that Chuck2 hears, he is essentially creating a new future in an alternate timeline that branches off when he travels into an alternate past where Chuck is yet to write that song.
Even if it was in the same universe, a loop has to have a starting point, and the starting point for this loop is "original" Chuck Writing the song the McFly gets to hear for him to then travel back into the past and then start the loop.
In this case, the loop ends when McFly goes back to his future, having changed the past to now read that Chuck heard someone play that song.
In that case, Only he would know that Chuck is the one who really wrote the song.
Interestingly, at the time of Back to the Future (1985), Chuck Berry was alive & rockin'. He passed in 2017, so he was still present for the 2015 of BttF 2 & 3 :) Hail, hail Rock'n'Roll!
Well the original chunk, “chunk 1” got the song from his cousin holding the phone for him to here it.
@@CheeseWyrmWoa
Nah
@@gameingpro2333That can't be the case. Marty traveling back in time changed a lot of things about the past, leading to him returning to an alternate present, which includes Chuck Berry technically being inspired by Marty. The original timeline, George Mcfly took Lorraine to the Under the Sea dance and Marvin performed a time appropriate set
This makes me wonder about decay in Jinn... elements, I guess? Because if it's, say, a perishable piece of food, time loops around it, but it's the same piece of food going around and around in that loop. If it's an idea, like a song or a recipe or a poem or something, we can't possibly perfectly replicate whatever idea we perceived to replicate to continue the loop, so it seems to leave a certain amount of room for a broken telephone scenario. The only way I could think this wouldn't happen is if Marty's inevitable slight deviations from the original song were somehow perfectly counteracted by Marvin's inevitable slight deviations, passing it between the two 'versions' of the song in the time loop
On Dr. Who, this was referred to as "The Bootstrap Paradox".
There was an episode of a TV anthology, which featured an Elvis impersonater who traveled back in time, and replaced real Elvis.
"The term comes from Robert Heinlein's 1941 story By His Bootstraps, which is about a time travel graduate student who gets caught in a causal loop."
Not only on Doctor Who but pretty much everywhere. I don't understand why NDT felt the need to invent a new name.
@@michaelgrosberg2665"his intelligence is only second to his ego"
Steven Moffat used to abuse this bootstrap paradox all the time as resolutions to episodes during his time as showrunner of Doctor Who. Only he could turn such a cool idea into a constant deus ex (still the best writer the show's ever had).
@@leonlaird_ I quite love Douglas Adams's work on the show. Although he was only credited with one completed story, I definitely see his influence on the work done during his tenure as script editor.
judgmentcallpodcast covers this. The Time Travel Paradox Explained
Joseph prince on his podcast did”time and space” the jinn creator
It's been covered by countless people. It's an ontological paradox, also called a bootstrap paradox. They exist in countless time travel media, from LOST to the films mentioned here. Nothing new.
This is ridiculous. 107 likes for crap like that? I am being blocked by Algorithms.
@@tazerwazerman wtf are you on about and why do you care about likes on UA-cam comments? They are meaningless.
Mr. Tyson is such fun and always informative. Thank you both.
I love the genuine Glee shared between the two when they both are on the same page.
Chuck is the grounding person, he brings everything back to today’s reality. Only Chuck looks at a couple of people stalking each other, instead of looking at it as two people uniquely connected in love and in this loop. No no that’s not it, they’re stalking each other. Good one Chuck.
I got through 2/3 of that before realizing you were talking about Nice and not Barry...
@@VoltisArt my apologies I should’ve said Chuck Nice
You can solve two paradoxes at once, this jin particle one can be solved with ship of thesius. Take the locket for example, if it is the same locket, that means it has existed for an infinite amount of time. It is bound to get dropped or scratched or just damaged from existing. So, as the parts are replaced, the pieces that broke off dont continue to time travel and the parts that are added arent jin particles. I dont know if i explained it well but i hope that makes sense
7:04 The plot of Dark, an excellent Netflix series
07:15 A Time Machine that is itself a Jinn Particle is the plot of Isaac Asimov's "The End of Eternity". Eternity is a time "elevator" (you go up floors to go forward in time, down to go back in time), and its creation was possible because one of its technicians went back in time with the knowledge on how to build it.
Isn't it the plot in dark as well?
Hail, fellow Asimov fan! Please, don't get Dr. Tyson started down the Psychohistory path. Wait, on second thought, let's do exactly that!
@@JustSomeRandomMusicFanI just learned that Foundation was from Isaac Asimov. Its one of my favorite shows the world building is amazing, plus I believe that psychohistory is actually possible today with enough data and computing power we might be able to predict at least something. But it wont be a small quantum computer like Hari has, probably a lot if data and AI centers combined
Basically the plot of Bill and Ted's, right?
I think earlier is Lester Del Rey's "and it comes out here" written in 1951 (although he actually wrote it 30 years later and sent it back to himself). m.gutenberg.org/files/51046/51046-h/51046-h.htm
I remember the first time I saw this episode, 3 weeks from now. Good old days.
I thought this comment was pretty underrated, so I'm glad to see it again.
Nor sure what year you're watching this, has it been used before. I'll go back a few years earlier and do it first 😅
I wish they asked the question "what happens when the locket breaks?" because it eventually has to since it's not being renewed in any way. Or "what happens when the song slowly changes more and more through the loop until it's something radically different?" because they're reciting it through memory so it can't be 100% perfect every time
Bru that’s super interesting
Record it, don't remember it. And the locket has just one time line, no renewal needed.
Broken telephone game from when we were kids.
The song could correct itself if both persons misremembers it and it results in the correct song being sung by one or both of them. In this case there is no correct song just different interpretations/versions for each time period. The locket's battery would die or the locket would get destroyed eventually because of entropy.
@@thekaxmax Incorrect. The locket has a perpetual loop timeline that it exists in. It is the same locket that goes to the future through normal time, gets given to him, and then gets given to her back in the past. Meaning each time it goes through the loop, it ages by 60 years. It will eventually break or wear down.
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR NEIL TO TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN FOR YEARS.
I remembered he had a name for theoretical objects that are bound within loops of time, and that he used a baseball as an example, but couldn't find it with any amount of searching. Let's hope this time I don't forget
Yes keep worshiping him in your cult
@@Noneomg What cult are you a member of, then?
(You must be a member of a cult yourself to be so randomly offended that someone else might like something you don't. Normal rational people just don't care. But for you to care so deeply, it must be because you're a member of the Jesus Death Cult or something similar to that, and so the fact that other people don't worship the same object of worship that you do, kind of irks you.)
@@Noneomgbro who hurt you? You’ve got 30 hate comments on this channel tf is wrong with you 😂😂
I watched the movie and thank you so much for talking about it. I think its a love letter that never reached its destination until now. Cheers.
Title: "The Time Travel Paradox You've Never Heard Of!"
NDT: "So in Back to the Future..."
Or he could call it the bootstrap paradox and then he wouldn't need to define a lesser known term that is the same concept.
So you had never heard of it lol
@@philiam900 whoosh
7:42 blueprints to the time machine in series dark.
Yessss
We had a time lap discussian in time travel in physics class: You build a time machine, travel back and will reach the time you build a time machine you travel back with.
idk how does neil do it but every time i see a video of him i get excited and goosebumped
almost evey single time
Really? I just get annoyed.
That was Mackinac Island in Northern Michigan. "Somewhere in time" - one of my fav movies. Love this channel 👍
My all time favorite movie with either Jane Seymour or Christopher Reeves.
Can't wait to see what updates from 4ra come next. They always manage to surprise us with something amazing
6:53 -- "those are the two most interesting examples of it" -- he's either never seen or has forgotten about "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" -- the lost keys, the fax, the garbage can ... -- what was wild is that Ted even explains the loop when he creates it
Those items didn't appear out of nowhere. They went back in time and grabbed a can, sent a fax, stole some keys.
But they created the jin loop by talking about it before they did it. It was genius
And The Doctor explained it with Bethoven
9:05 But when a voltage is applied across the plates, an electric field is generated between them. This field can be described by the electric flux. In a capacitor, the flux represents the total number of electric field lines passing through the area between the plates.
exploring stuff like this is my favorite thing in movies/media
ua-cam.com/video/R2JVJQuYvms/v-deo.html always makes me think of this song, and it's still at the top of the golden era of electronic music, IMO.
John Conner from Terminator is a Jinn. His father is from the future and was sent by him to ensure he was born.
actually, the sem. Nop that's too far lol
Hhhmmmm.,.
In the original movie, yes, but as they expanded the series they altered the time travel rules. From T2 we learned that T1 created a new timeline. This means that while John's father is the same, the rest of the events are not. That would mean that the events that lead to the existence of the old John Connor of T1 are not the same that led to the young John Connor of T2. My guess is that there is a timeline without John Connor in which for whatever reason Skynet had to send a Terminator to the past and Reese was sent to stop it. This created John Connor, altering the reason why Reese was sent while a loop of slightly different timelines in which John sends Reese were created.
@@Tenebris_PR interesting..so kind of like biff's version of 1985 in Back to the Future II?
@@MattCanev419 yeah, although in Back to the future we don't see other timelines (there is only one in which he is rich), the idea would be the same. One would guess that while the first time Biff went back with the Almanac because he saw an opportunity, in the next go he will time travel because he knows that's what he has to do. The timeline may even stay that way until another time traveler interferes.
That is a very interesting theory. I like it thanks for the content 👍
On behalf of all Rick and Morty fans I'm offended!
Ricks _don't do time travel!_
* spoilers *
That was an alternate reality Rick visiting Rick (currently inventing portal travel) offering Rick the invention!
Rick refuses and evil Rick kills Rick's wife! That's the origin story!
Tsk tsk!
Rattlestar Ricklactica (Season 4, Episode 5) has them explicitly going back in time and is a major part of the episode.
@@Eyevounot via portal gun though, they have to use the snakes TDE.
Every now and then you will see a box in Rick‘s garage labeled “Time Travel Stuff”.
Nerd!!
Thank you! I scrolled down through the comments JUST to see if someone else had said it before I did. Had to scroll too far.
Also, the time travel stuff box is an intentional object as a reminder that they SHELVED the whole idea of Time Travel. Rick doesn't respect time travel.
It's also the reason a lot of people are already annoyed with the anime version being time traveled focused.
Also, regardless of whether he does or does not time travel in the show in general, it doesn't change the fact that the specific scene mentioned isn't a time travel scene.
I like that you referenced Somewhere in time (1980) because it always made me wonder and also it’s such an iconic movie!
I didn't know this phenomenon had a name. My mother and grandmother LOVED Somewhere in Time. I remember twins year old me blowing their minds with this paradox.
@ Yes and also the reference to the subconscious mind and how much it can influence our perception.
This is great. Thanks for explaining this. I wrote a series of books that uses this type of time travel, and I didn't know it had a name.
Loved your explanation on the gin particle. I would love to know more about martini particles, whiskey waves and oh, vodka rays.
hahaha
Listening to this for me is mindblowing
It's so interesting to hear what can happen in time travel, which is by itself really ineresting
I have a feeling that if you're not careful with time travel then you wind up having a whole bunch of people remembering that something was different even though it never was cause their memory event happened in the prior timeline before the time traveler went back and changed things.
Good video. :) There are lots of examples of this in pop culture, the one I immediately thought of was the character Lister's origin in Red Dwarf.
Happy Thanksgiving my friends 👋🏻
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy thanksgiving mayn
🦃
So, on the specific episode that Chuck mentions with Rick and Morty, that origin story is not actually time travel. Rick explicitly states multiple times throughout the series that he DOES NOT mess with time travel (because the series has "Time Police," its a whole thing), and Rick's portal gun is strictly ONLY alternate-universe travel. So, instead of Rick learning how to make his portal gun from a future version of his own timeline, he is actually being told by a Rick from a parallel world who has an entirely different history and timeline than "our" Rick. So in that case, there is no "closed loop" happening there, like with all of the other examples.
An example to showcase what the episode is basically doing would be if you decided to send this video idea to an alternate version of yourself that hasn't had this idea yet, say a version of you that lives in a world where the Nazis won WW2, then you quickly hop back to our original world. That short trip doesn't change our world's history to match up with the "Nazis Winning" world, nor does it change the "Nazis World's" past to all of a sudden change the winner to the allies. And it doesn't cause a "time loop" to occur, since you don't have multiple different pasts that you personally remember in order to make that sort of time loop possible, though if you do simultaneously remember the allies both winning and losing WW2 in history class, I'd get your brain checked out by a doctor for those memory issues. Either that, or there would have to be some sort of memory modification going on which would just be out of scope for what we are trying to discuss.
That all being said, I have since stopped watching the series after season 5-6 or something, they're on at least 7 now I think, so it is possible they've ret-con-ed the events in a newer episode I haven't seen, but even so I highly doubt that they would break their own established "rules" for their world's fictional logic like that.
Love this discussion. Thanks..
Then I guess The TVA Handbook is a JInn particle
TVA stands for Time Variance Authority. The Handbook itself has no origins, exists in our reality and is considered a true time travel artifact.🤓
That's exactly what I thought! was just gonna comment until I found yours :)
Dear Neil & Chuck, great episode as always.
Would like to mention what are probably the ur-examples:
“-All you Zombies-“ the short story (1958) by the late great Robert A. Heinlein, also filmed as the Indie film starring Ethan Hawke & Sarah Snook, “Predestination” (2014).
“By his Bootstraps” (1941), novella, also by Robert A. Heinlein
On the latter, Carl Sagan and David Lewis have commented on the way science fiction can deliver complex info to a reader, and the “perfectly consistent” nature of time travel as described in-story
On the former, the twist is too good to spoil in the off chance you haven’t read it
I believe in the doc's explanation of time in Back to the Future 2, where changing the past creates an alternate timeline. So in that case Jinn particles aren't a thing. In Marty's original timeline, Chuck Barry wrote the song, but as soon as Marty went back in time, he created a new timeline in which he created the song.
So, how and "when" did Marty hear and learn the song? If Chuck Barry wrote it in the original timeline and Marty played it in the past, how was the song created then? the song is the Jinn
So what happens to Marty's original timeline? Does it still exist? Like a pre recorded reality we can just press rewind & get back into?
@@rocknwatkins, the original timeline may not really be the original when it has been altered by the changes made by the events of what Marty has done in the past, multiple branches probably have been created. but the song, the Jinn, remains in the loop on all possible realities. 🤔 my head now hurts
@@justsoirritatedsoilaugh no, it's not. Chuck wrote the song, marty changed stuff, then he didn't. There's no 'loop' or repeating cause, because marty recalls the original.
Back to the future was just a bad choice, because time travel doesn't work that way here...
@@KeithElliott-zd8cx temporal paradox. Marty did change his future. it caused a butterfly effect where the events from the past that Marty has altered, have changed the lives of his parents, their family, and Biff. the song was still there. It was still written by Chuck Berry. or is it? 🤔😂
I swear this is the greatest show to listen to when you're high
In "Somewhere in Time" would the object (the jewellery) wither over time or not
Coz it is moving back and forth in time but from the jewellery's perspective it is just changing hands and moving forward in time
Nope. Any change would change the loop and might result in the backward step not happening. Thus the paradox.
From Chuck's perspective, Marty wrote "Johnny B. Goode." But, from Marty's perspective Chuck is the author. Thus the causal paradox. However, from the viewer's perspective (us watching the movie), it's clear Chuck wrote "Johnny B. Goode." There has to be some time-independent interpretation of the sequence of events that avoids the paradox.
yes and no. There's weird time travel mechanics sometimes, but back to the future, it's clearly alterable.
Chuck wrote it 'the first time', marty changed things. It's a bad example of this.
The Rick and Morty reference was actually very intuitive. Great job Chuck!
"Cus otherwise what are you doing?" 4:26 😂
7:13 this is actually in the netflix series Dark!
Absolutely, bro. The best moments on 4ra are when we all play together and have those epic wins
6:09 I think they're thinking about this incorrectly. Neither Marty or Superman went back in time. What they actually did was move into another time stream that was positioned further back than their original time stream. And that time stream was so analogous to their original timestream that they couldn't tell the difference. But once they entered into the new time stream they brought an object from one timestream into the other time stream. And so that object did have an origin. But it's origin is not from the second time stream, it's from the first time stream. And so in the second time stream it's an illusion that it's jinn object but it does have an origin in the original time stream.
I was thinking the same thing. It now exists in that time loop, but it was created in alternate timeline. It's explained in BTTF2 even.
There is no fate except the one we make ourselves. 😉
@@Apexremy23 No one said anything about fate.
That’s what I was thinking. The object clearly has an origin but it is transported into the loop
That works for the Back to the Future example but not the Time after Time one. How could she give him the locket in the future if he didn’t give it to her in the past?
Another issue with time travel in movies is their purpose for using it. If you go back in time to change something, then it removes the reason to go back in time in the first place. Without the reason, you never go back in time to change it. Since you don't go back in time to change it, it stays the thing that gives you a reason to go back in time.
A Jinn object doesn't work because it would keep aging/rusting until it just doesn't exist anymore.
Interesting, that no one mentioned it. That is so obvious! We can have only "jinn" things, that cannot age, e.g., information
Yes I was thinking about this specifically with the time machine example they use. If there's no one present in the loop who built it. Then no one can repair it when it inevitably breaks. It then can't travel to continue the loop. So a paradox occurs where it isn't able to meet it's pre-destination's existence.
Something like a watch could be repaired or restored (it would cause a break in the loop to some extent but hypothetically the loop could continue as it had before it was repaired) which then gets into the whole Ship of Theseus concept.
Nope. Whatever damage it accrued will be repaired by the time it goes back. It's a product of time. It will never break or degrade. It is stuck in a time loop with no beginning or end. Did you even listen to the video? No you didn't. Idiots.
But thats assuming the object is still subject to the aging/rusting process we know in reg time. Rusting/aging away would still have the particles just existing though technically if it did..
It will reconstitute in its time loop being the newest at the earliest point of the time loop.
Not really a paradox if you think about it, according to everything we know time is relative to the observer and their speed, surroundings, and mass etc. So that literally means if you go backward in time there is 2 basic realistic options. 1 you de-age and become younger with the reverse flow of time, or 2 you somehow actually step out of and go to a different time coordinate but in reality it's not really you moving through time you've stepped outside of it.
So if you step outside of time you'd deviate things simply by changing events just by breathing, but in the case of the song Chuck Berry would have ended up writing a different song inspired by Johnny B Goode. However, Marvin Berry would've also been cited as a major inspiration as well because he found the sound that inspired Chuck Berry. Many variables change the whole plot changes. It is inevitable, and black holes kind of prove that nothing suspect would happen because they are intermixing all the time and space they can all over the universe.
Interesting assessment. Kind of falls within the realm of the multiverse IMO.
I like to think of these kinds of paradoxes as ultimately boiling down to the question "What is the start of a circle"? Not a circle that is drawn on a page mind you, but the very mathematical concept. And if course the answer is a circle has neither begining nor end, it simply is.
Under the above then, your explanation would be that there are no circles but instead only spirals. Where you can never make it back perfectly to the begining. Which is another alternative.
I never watched Somewhere in Time before this video.
Well, I got to see great romantic/time travel movie thanks to you guys.
2:38 - is this not a bootstrap paradox?
Precisely..
8:10 - but wasn't that fake portal gun origin story created by Rick in order to deceive aliens who wanted to know it's secret
Real origin story, fake math, zero time travel due to parallel universe version of Rick
2:07 , I laughed for 5 minutes
SAME 😂😂😂😂
Random Idea for a film:
Record
Plot would revolve around the main character in a room with a VCR. There is also an antigravity robot that assists the main character by answering questions, providing company and selecting the tapes to be played. The main character is tasked by scientists to replay one tape several times every day. Each day the main character leaves, only to return and view another tape.
The VRC itself is anomalous. It operates with any compatible tape, but once playback begins, it cannot be paused, stopped, rewound, fast-forwarded, or altered in speed. The tape plays linearly from beginning to end, adhering strictly to its natural runtime. During the first few plays, the contents of the tape unfold as expected, adhering to the events and sequences recorded. However, as the tape is replayed repeatedly, Denizens within the recording-be they people, animals, or other entities-begin to develop awareness of the repeating cycle. With each loop, an increasing number of denizens retain their memories, creating a growing sense of déjà vu that escalates into outright awareness of their entrapment within a loop. This awareness fundamentally disrupts the fabric of the recorded world, giving rise to confusion, rebellion, and eventually, social collapse.
If no sentient beings are present within the recording, the environment itself "awakens", gaining sentience and self-awareness. This leads to the spontaneous emergence of new entities within the recording, birthed from the fabric of the environment itself. If the recording consists of a black screen with no audio, the tape's playback initiates a "big bang" event on the screen. A sudden eruption of light and sound occurs, followed by the rapid development of a new universe, complete with its own rules of physics and life. This new universe quickly progresses to a state of equilibrium before the tape resets and the event begins anew.
Each tape that is played represents a form of visual media recording, such as a movie, television show, home video, music video or otherwise. For each tape the main character documents the changes and reports to the robot. As the film goes on, the main character becomes increasingly paranoid of the camera's in the room. Eventually the main character stops watching the recording altogether, because they themselves realize that they are in a recorded time loop. The main character goes absolutely insane from this revelation.
As you may have guessed, the main character is a recorded version of another character. The one who was once recorded is replaying the recording of the previous day on the VCR. The narrative day that was passing in the tape was actually a loop. In the first playing's of this recording, the robot just gave the same tape to the main character, but eventually gained awareness and started giving them different tapes(Where the film begins). The main character's "original" then asks the original robot if they themselves are in a recording and the film ends while leaving it open to interpretation.
I'm not using that one you can just have it.
Way cool. Someone please do this!
Film Name: Watchers
btw it's gotta be like a 10hr long film or something 😂 no way I'm getting full enjoyment out of it if this concept is only explored for 120 minutes
or make it a series!
all ways like your video but i did like the back to the future reference that hit the spot for me 😊
Regarding "Somewhere In Time": The stalking itself is a Jinn particle. There's no indication that the Chris Reeves character would have stalked anyone if he hadn't himself been stalked -- which only happened because of the time travel.
Here's my time travel paradox - a supercomputer that can read your brain waves and is connected to the internet can act faster than you are consciously able to recognize your own thoughts - think high frequency trading - but a supercomputer meant to beat you before you even know it consciously.
I disagree there are plenty of situations where this has been brought up in my friend group and the biggest factor to think about for this would be if you where to do something unpredictable so many times it would in theory end up counteracting its constantly thinking fast there fore being 1 step ahead” and so yes for a period of time or until u end up doing unpredictable things it’ll be ahead until you do become “unpredictable” if you will.
Thats just predicting, not time travel.
Unless you say that the weatherman is actually a time traveler :P
Your brain is already doing that sort of thing. Search for "Temporal Integration Window" it will blow your mind.
The live match viewing and instant replays on 4ra are a game-changer. So much more excitement!
*The Jinn particle
Muslims: 😕😦😧😨😰
IYKYK 😅
I imagine the paradox as a spiral loop: an artist creates a song, the song is taken back in time to before it was created, and the artist is inspired by the song, which creates an alternative reality, which can then progress into the time loop. The inspiration from hearing the song may form variations of the complete song until the point at which the heard inspiration will always inspire the perfect match of the final song.
" Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" Carl Sagan
Another question for the locket. The locket is a physical object that is trapped in a time loop. it keeps getting passed on. Will it degrade over time? Because from the locket's perspective, it just keeps on travelling back and forth past future past future etc, getting "old"
Question: Will the locket ever grow older within the Jinn loop? The song will always be there but will something that is materialistic that can grow old, will it do so in the jinn loop? For the locket will it ever rust, time slow down, so working? Or will it do the opposite?
I read a supposition at one time explaining that once a time machine is created, it cannot be destroyed by the very nature of how they work. There was an entire story based around that - where the creator had to learn to access the entity without the controls once their physical version was damaged.
I love the "flux capacitor" explanation
I can think of one simple explanation for these.
The Chuck Berry one is simple, he would have written that song anyway, Marty went back sang it before Chuck originally wrote it, so Chuck heard it and sang it, then Marty heard chuck perform it and the loop went from there.
The pocket watch was not originally why he went back in time, He may have met her and and learnt about her life and wanted to go back and meet the younger her, he bought the pocket watch as one of the old things (his cloths etc) that he took back with him, gave her the pocket watch which she then gave him and that's how that loop began.
The other one is Terminator, John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to save Sarah Connor, Kyle sleeps with Sarah and Sarah has a son who turns out to be a boy who she names John who sends Kyle back to be his father. Simple, Sarah had a son at some point in time and names him John, John sends Kyle back to save Sarah, they have a son whom she names John and raises him to be that John and that loop goes on.
You can apply this to any such time travel paradox.
Thank you for this
Need to watch Somewhere in Time again! Wasn't it a watch? It was my 1st thought when you revealed the idea of the paradox. Great soundtrack by John Barry
Jinn partical time machine was done in the Nexflix series called "Dark" (which is a fantastic show BTW) and was executed amazingly. It's a must watch 3 season show If you are in to time travel.
Ray Bradbury wrote a story named “The Toynbee Convector”. It had a similar loop, but with a _primer_ :
A man makes a fake timeship and a detailed model of a futuristic city, films it, then tells everyone he traveled to the future and this is how great it’s going to be. People believe him and are inspired to create that future, in which they invent that timeship and retcon the whole thing into reality.
I think part of the "problem" is our assumption that everything happens on a "line." If time really is the 4th dimension, all possibilities happen concurrently, so there's a non-zero chance that these kinds of things don't exist in a "loop" so much as traversing across different levels of existence.
Like with the BttF reference. There's one timeline where Marty learns the song from the radio. There's a timeline where Chuck Barry learns the song from a "mysterious stranger," but out story touches across both.
But we see it as a single event line, because we lack the ability to perceive the other permutations that are constantly branching out from any one moment.
Simplification of what I'm getting at. Time exists as an "ocean" of every possibility that could exist, and our timeline is just a current moving through those possibilities.
When you involve time travel, it's no different than throwing a rock (or a boulder) into that current. Things get "wonky" as it tries to correct itself.
The entire ending to Bill and Ted's excellent adventure is a series of Jinn Particles to get the protagonists out of their problem.
So fun 😄🤗 love these two
A flux capacitor would store the change in electromagnetism in a material. How do you store a change?
Okay, big fan of Back to the Future, and despite your denial of the Flux Capacitor, loved this. Also a big fan of the time travel genre, and so I know of multiple examples of the Jinn Particle. (My favorite was in Asimov 's Science Fiction Magazine. Forget title/author, but a man has himself show up with a time machine. He fixes the time machine (missing wire) and so winds up going to his previous self, to get the time machine fixed, instigating the loop, because the wire keeps disappearing every time the machine travels in time.)
the Doctor explained this to us, he called it the Bootstrap paradox. Very nice
My mind is blown, not by the particle, but that Neil says he has seen "a lot" of Rick and Morty. Awesome.
There is another layer of paradox on Jinn particles: Radioactive Decay
The case of the song works as the knowledge was transferred from one set of neurons to another.
But with the locket, it is the same physical item. If the locket is experiencing this infinite time, then it will have fully undergone radioactive decay long before its handed to anyone. But if it decayed, it would never be handed over, meaning that the time loop is broken. There are a few possibilities here to resolve this
1. Every iteration of the item's experience through the time loop is slightly different as a result of fewer and fewer of its atoms remaining, but with only minimal effects at first, but eventually reaching a critical point where the timeline varies greatly, literally spiraling the loop until the object is no longer handed to the next person. The implications of this would involve multiple timelines existing and running in parallel.
2. A Jinn particle only exists within a time loop where all of its atoms remain. (The longer the loop, the less likely for the Jinn particle to exist). This would also imply that radioactive decay is deterministic and as a result of external rather than internal forces (think Laplace's Demon)
3. We have a feaux Jinn particle, replaced during the time loop (e.g. the woman buys a new matching locket during her life to replace the old one, and then gives that one to the man)
When I go back in time everything in between gets destroyed apart from me and my memory. You have already lived this section a few times
Just a sudden thought/question I have about time travel:
Since space and time are linked, when time traveling shouldn't one also need to think of where the space would be when they traveled through time, not just on earth but where earth would be in the solar system and where the solar system would be in the galaxy?