eli5: What is the bootstrap Paradox?
In: 361
Something in a time travel story that exists within a loop but has no apparent origin.
In the movie *Somewhere in Time* Chritopher Reeve plays a writer who receives a pocket watch from an old woman who acts as if she knows him. She dies shortly after. Turns out she was an actress decades ago and he ends up traveling back in time, bringing the pocket watch with him, and having a romance with her in the past. He ends up getting yanked back to the present unintentionally. When this happens he leaves the watch behind that she then keeps as a momento until eventually giving it to him in the beginning of the movie.
So where did the watch come from originally? It appears to be from her time period, but she didn’t buy it at a store. She got it from him when he traveled to the past. He only had it because he got it from her in the present at the beginning. The watch’s very existence seem to be pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. Who made it? When? There doesn’t seem to be any source for its origin but yet it’s there. Bootstrap paradox.
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