Time Machine Jinn
+10 12 Votes
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By MattyFresh
- Time Machine Jinn
- Created: May 28, 2008
- Last updated: Aug 14, 2008
- After episode: 4.12: There’s No Place Like Home, Part 1
- Status: Current
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The book Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe by Richard Gott gives a definition of a Time Machine Jinn as a system with closed world-lines. This essentially means something that exists only in one loop of time.
This principle goes as follows: an old lady meets you and gives you a gold watch, remarking you were the love of her life; she tells you to go to a certain hotel and look at the guest-list for 1921; you look and find both her name and yours; you get in a time machine, traveling back to 1921, where you sign your name, meet the (now young) lady, fall in love and give her the gold watch as a gift, before you are forced to leave for the ‘future’ again. Who created the Jinn, the gold watch? So the Jinn is a logical impossibility. However Gott’s own solution to the creation of the universe involves such a Jinn principle.
The Island could be a Jinn. The DI created the Island, built a time machine on the Island using its special properties and sent the entire Island back in time, where it collided with the Black Rock (moved spatially as well, since the movement of tectonic plates would have caused the Island to drift over the years). On the Black Rock was Magnus Hanso, whose great grandson Alvar Hanso eventually co-founded the Dharma Initiative, which then created the Island and built the time machine and on and on.
Now, Jinns can continue this time loop many times, however it will continuously be losing thermal energy through radiation, and therefore the number of loops is limited. Perhaps everyone on the Island are contained in this time loop which has gone around quite a few times, and a few are beginning to catch on: Ben and Whidmore specifically. This could explain why Ben cannot kill Whidmore. Since Whidmore is also a contributor to the DI, killing him may break the time loop.
For another source on Time Machine Jinns, see the Classical and Quantum Gravity journal article “The Jinn of the Time Machine: non-trivial self-consistent solutions” by A Lossev and I D Novikov.
Key characters
| Short Name | Full Name | Episodes | Theories |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jin | Jin-Soo Kwon | 3.2, 2.16, 1.6, 1.17, 1.23, 3.18 | 266 |
I REALLY LIKE THIS IDEA!! WAS A BIT confused BY THE JINN THING TO START WITH. (thought YOU MEANT THE KOREAN GUY!! - DOH!!)
LOADS OF PEOPLE CROSS OVER IN THIER flashbacks TOO, WHICH WOULD MAKE SENSE.
+1 FROM ME.
THis is the first time-theory that really makes sense.
WHy??
Because the theory of constants is not needed, in the sense of the human consiousness!!!
The Constants are only attributed to Faraday and Desmond!
This explains everything else with time outside of the mind-traveling that Faraday and Desmond are prone to experience and this is why I like it.
great theory +1
sorry, can you explain what a Jinn is again? i don’t quite get it, i tried to google it but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot out there on it (at least that i could find) but it sounds very interesting! +1!
I still say the Jinn is Jin ;)
Bailey - The creation of the time machine allows for the possibility of situations with a very fuzzy definition of causality. Think about the watch example: Where did the man get the watch? From the old lady. Okay, so where did the old lady get the watch? From the man, but in 1921. So, where did the watch come from? This is where we see that the watch is a Jinn: it exists solely in one loop of time. Since it is a complete loop, without beginning or end, there is a very unnatural cause and effect: The man got the watch from the old lady who got the watch from the man.
Jackismydad - The similarity of Jinn to Jin is why this concept caught my eye, but I couldn’t see how Jin could be a Jinn. But perhaps that is why he is not one of the O6…….
ooooooh i get it now! Thanks for the explanation, i like it!
Seems to me a Jinn is like a get-out clause of a paradox.
WOW. So, if the island is the Jinn in a time loop, then would it be possible to leave the time loop without the Jinn, but still retain the memory of the Jinn. For instance, if the man goes back to the past and gives the watch to the lady but then in the future he never receives the watch, would he now lose all memory of the watch and the lady and be a part of a new time loop in which the watch(the island) never exists? +1 for a theory that is as creative as the show.
i dont think that the jinn has anything to do with time travel on the show. i doubt it would be something as complicated as this where most of the viewers wouldnt be able to understand.
you didnt really have me until you brought up the black rock. if somehow the island has been “moved” before(through time), and sprung up right underneath the ship during its voyage, that would completely explain why the ship is a couple miles inland! completely amazing for that i give you plus 1. something tells me you have something here
A jinn exists in a closed time loop by the sounds of it. I am having a hard time with the idea of the island being a jinn created by Dharma. I don’t think that Dharma created the island and then created a time machine on the island but I guess anything is possible with this show. So is the island the egg and Dharma is the chicken? And does that mean that if not for the island itself Dharma wouldn’t exist? Or am I just confusing myself more.
The island pre-dates Dharma. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this, and one piece of hard evidence. The hard evidence is the picture of the smoke monster Locke drew as a little boy. That picture means the smoke monster, and thus the island, existed in the early 1960’s. Dharma didn’t create the island. Also, for the record I am an avid anti-time loop person.
A picture drawn by a child is “hard evidence”?
The fact that Locke had memories of an island he will not actually be on until the future seems more like evidence of a time-loop or reincarnation.