Kirk's Daily Schedule

...Or he usually subscribed to the popular principle of not eating anything after 6 PM because it decreases the quality of your night's sleep. Boozing with Klingons would be an exception, of course.

Timo Saloniemi

 

It's far more likely that the glasses were meant to correct presbyopia (farsightedness) rather than myopia (nearsightedness), since McCoy specifically mentions Kirk's age as a factor. Everybody, even people with perfect 20/20 vision, becomes farsighted in middle age due to loss of elasticity in the lens of the eye. To remedy that farsightedness, prescription lenses aren't needed -- just drugstore reading glasses are usually sufficient.

 

Ah, good point! And of course, Kirk does use the glasses for reading or observing close detail, rather than for peering at the distance...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well, they did take time to play cards (bridge) on Regula.

It's listed as 1830 Personal Time.

 

Wow, I have never noticed that BEFORE, now I must go back watch that section again real soon.

 

Sorry for being late to the party, had no idea that this paradox from ST IV would be discussed (the other one being Scotty's formula for transparent aluminum).

The glasses cannot be the same for one simple reason: The glasses itself are exposed to wear between ST II and ST IV, if just on a microscopic level. So there'll be scratches etc. by the time Kirk sells these at the pawn shop.

No how could these scratches and wear already be there in ST II considering that the events leading to these, have not yet occurred?

The most likely scenario is that McCoy bought the glasses (whose history could theoretically be traced back to their creation), gave these to Kirk who eventually sold these to the pawn shop. What finally happened to these glasses remains unknown.

The only thing that is safe to assume is that both sets of glasses (the older ones sold by Kirk and the younger ones waiting to get into his posession) co-existed for some time around 1986 on planet Earth.

Bob

 

There would obviously be different levels of scratching on different cycles of the time loop. At the simplest, we might be witnessing a "one-stroke engine" where ST2 leads to one of the lenses getting cracked, meaning it is replaced by a fresh one in ST4, and Kirk thus gets a fresh one in ST2, breaks it, and gets it refreshed in ST4, and so forth. In a more complicated setup, minor damage to the glasses would gradually accumulate from cycle to cycle, until it warranted changing of components, refreshing the spectacles for future cycles. In that setup, these "glasses of Theseus" could be billions of cycles old, while no component was older than can be reasonably expected in terms of durability.

In any time loop, it's folly to think that every cycle would take place in the way described on screen. The camera looks at an interesting iteration of the loop; it would ignore uninteresting ones, and would fail to show the full variety of cycles possible in a stable loop, let alone any moments of unstability that terminate (or launch) the loop. Unless the point of the story is to see the loop terminated, of course.

Timo Saloniemi

 

But the fresh one in ST 4 is exactly the same glass that will break in ST2, down to the atomic level and with all its impurities and individual characteristics.

But the essential thing remains, it pops into existence from nothingness and thus violates the fundamental principle of causality.

Quite possible that the glasses we see next to Kirk's daily schedule are the same ones he sold to the pawn shop and somehow got back into his posession (maybe another birthday gift from McCoy and thus Kirk's prediction turned true).

Bob

 

As the age of the spectacles is never actually addressed onscreen, even in STII, I've always felt the most likely scenario is that McCoy had them made to look like 19th century reading spectacles to appeal to Kirk's love for antiques, while providing a new, accurate prescription for the lenses. As I said before, the frames also suffer wear over time, to the point that when you get new lenses it is often recommended that you get new frames as well.

 

McCoy explicitly states that they're over four hundred years old in the Director's Edition.

--Sran

 

No need for that: the optician in the 1980s could pick any lens, and in different cycles of the loop no doubt picks different lenses.

There's no such principle. To the contrary, things popping into existence from nothingness is believed to be a fundamental characteristic of the universe now, one without which there would be no universe.

Quite apart from that, a time loop is not required to be eternal. There's nothing wrong with it having a beginning and an end, or possibly several. If the one-stroke-engine approach doesn't seem aesthetically pleasing, there's always the approach where the glasses are first created, and then thrown in the loop - this merely means that during some cycles, there may exist two or more incarnations of the glasses.

Indeed. Something like that happening would be the exact sort of harmless fun that the Trek universe runs on.

Timo Saloniemi

 

More of a loop-the-loop than a perpetual loop then?

 

There ought to be different levels of stability for those things. If ending up in a loop is the result of mundane events, then there will probably be thousands of cycles. If it's the result of some very odd choices being made, such as in TNG "Cause and Effect", then just half a dozen iterations will probably destabilize it.

I don't see why the glasses thing in the TOS movies should be particularly unstable, as our heroes stuck in the 1980 could not readily pick some other object to sell - Spock's bathrobe isn't worth anything, while Klingon hardware would be too problematic. And if they in every cycle sell their merchandise near the bus stop to the aquarium, and Kirk or McCoy in the future happens to live nearby (or the nearest transporter station is nearby), odds are good that McCoy in every cycle will go to that venerable pawn shop cum antiquities expert when shopping for Kirk's present. And so forth. But there are always things that could go differently there, altering or breaking the loop. Which shouldn't concern us, because we only need to assume that the loop had one cycle in which the 2280s and 1980s events happened as shown. Or perhaps one-and-a-half, if the glasses are still there in ST6.

Timo Saloniemi

 

You'd have to suppose that Kirk replaced the broken eyeglasses with a functional pair, possibly modern, to use when reading.

However, he kept the antique pair with the broken lenses in a pocket of his uniform as some sort of ironic good luck charm.

This is how he happened to have the old pair with him when on the search for Spock.

 

In teh Directior's ediitonof Wrathof Khan McCoy says the glasses are over 40 years old.

The pawnshop man in The Voyage Home says that they are 18th century (according to the calendar era in use at the time).

So those two items indicate that the glasses were made sometime between 1701 and 1800 (according to the calendar era in use at the time of the visit to the pawnshop), and that they are between 400 and 500 years old when McCoy gives them to Kirk. Thus the day of The Warth of Khan should be somewhere between 2101 and 2300 (according to the calendar era in use at the time of the visit to the pawnshop).

 

'Tis the season of reruns?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Haven't you been around here a bit to long to be necro-threading?