Bootstrap Paradox: Information and Objects With No Origin

The bootstrap paradox, also known as the ontological paradox, describes a time travel situation in which an event, object, person, or piece of information ultimately causes itself, so its history seems to come from nowhere. The name derives from the expression "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps." A classic illustration is a time traveler who receives a watch, then later carries that same watch into the past and gives it to the person who first gave it to them, leaving the watch with no manufacturing origin. The paradox is distinct from the grandfather paradox. The grandfather paradox is a consistency paradox, in which changing the past creates a logical contradiction. The bootstrap paradox creates no contradiction; nothing both exists and fails to exist. Instead it violates the intuition that effects must trace back to causes, which is why it is classed as an ontological rather than a logical problem. Robert Heinlein's fiction popularized the idea, notably the 1958 story "All You Zombies" (adapted as the 2014 film Predestination), in which the protagonist becomes both their own mother and father. Physicists Andrei Lossev and Igor Novikov introduced the term "jinn" in 1992 for self-originating objects and information, distinguishing jinn of the first kind (objects) from jinn of the second kind (information). Bootstrap paradoxes arise in spacetimes containing closed timelike curves, where such loops can be mathematically consistent solutions of general relativity. See Causal Loop: Self-Caused Sequences of Events and Novikov Self-Consistency Principle: Why Time Travel Need Not Create Paradoxes.