r/DaystromInstitute • u/RepresentativeAsk471 • 14d ago
How would Kirk's Time Traveling Glasses actually work?
This is what always confused me about Kirk's glasses. In The Voyage Home, Kirk sells his glasses to get money to be able to function in 1980s San Francisco. Kirk finds an antique dealer who offers Kirk $100 for the glasses. At which time Spock asks if they were a gift from Dr. McCoy.
"And they will be again, that's the beauty of it." Kirk quips.
Now, setting aside how unlikely it is that these are the same pair of glasses that McCoy gets for Kirk later (although, intact 18th Century glasses would be quite rare by the 1980s), and assuming that these are in fact the correct glasses... wouldn't that cause a temporal anomaly? These glasses are already 200 years old by the 1980s. Everything ages and decays over time. If these glasses keep going backwards in time and essentially getting recycled, wouldn't they eventually fall apart, altering the timeline as Kirk goes back?
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u/Pristine-Ad-4306 13d ago edited 13d ago
Its known as a Jinn Particle, an object stuck in a time loop that has no beginning or end from the point-of-view of the object. If the glasses McCoy bought Kirk are the same glasses that Kirk sells in the past, then they don't exist prior to Kirk selling them and they don't exist after Kirk travels back in time, but from the glasses's perspective they have always and will always exist.
This doesn't take into account multi-verses of course, where the glasses maybe in an entirely different universe every time Kirk travels back in time.
EDIT: Actually I realized I was wrong, they're not a Jinn Particle, because a Jinn Particle requires that the object goes back in time before it would have been created and supplants the need for it to be created in the first place.