TIME TRAVEL RULES

The component of time travel in the LOST story line was probably one of the most debated elements to the series. Many considered it a "jump the shark" script moment. Others thought that it could lead to The Answers of the Island's mysteries.

Even though LOST is fictional, writers and physicists have discussed "realistic" attitudes toward the genre of time travel in literature. In any time travel story, one needs a solid starting point to explain the trigger or reason for the time travel. For example, in the novel,  The Time Traveler's Wife, which tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a man with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to skip around in time. Or a widely seen film series, Back to the Future, in which a tricked-out DeLorean must reach 88 mph with a massive jolt of energy to jump into the past.

Physicists have many theories about how time travel should work. In 2009, a Toronto Star article indicated that physicists theorize a way to exploit Einstein's theory of general relativity to come up with "practical" models of time machines. Kip Thorne, in Black Holes & Time Warps, describes how wormholes can be successfully used to travel back in time, while in Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, J. Richard Gott does the same with gargantuan cosmic strings – threadlike concentrations of matter of almost unimaginable density and length – moving at close to the speed of light.

Quality fiction, like science itself,  still needs to abide by a few fundamental ground rules. Time travel needs a foundational base in order to have viewers or reader's to "buy in" to the premise.

Generally speaking, literary guides come up with the following fundamental rules.

1.  We are in only one universe.

Experts point out that there's no evidence to support the notion that parallel universes exist.  More importantly, Einstein's theory of general relativity – the branch of physics that might make time travel possible – doesn't take kindly to the idea. Every solution to Einstein's equations involves just a single universe.

On the flip side, in 1957, physicist Hugh Everett proposed what has become known as the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was one of the great breakthroughs of the 20th century, and it predicted, among much else, that the motions of electrons and other small particles are fundamentally random. Everett, then at the Pentagon, wondered whether the universe wasn't branching off into two nearly identical copies each time one of these random events occurred. Since there are lots of particles in the universe and they move around and interact very quickly, these parallel universes would multiply almost without limit.

The problem with the parallel universe concept in fiction is that the events in the main universe time line become irrelevant or less compelling because it does not matter what action the character does, the parallel universes will balance things out.  Human beings believe that they have one body, one mind, one heart and one soul. We do not have a core belief that we are concurrently "living" in multiple universes.

 2. You cannot go back in time to a time "before" your time machine was created.

In  Einstein's universe, space and time are curved and very closely related to each other. This means that traveling through time would be much like traveling through a tunnel in space – in which case you'd need both an entrance and an exit. As a time traveler, you can't visit an era unless there's already a time machine when you get there – the " an off-ramp" required for any time destination.

This time-machine construction clause is one of the most often overlooked of the rules of time travel. The movie Terminator proposed a single historical line (or loop) with no alternate universes. Machines along the time loop would act like stations on a subway.  The Time Traveler's Wife is more clever as the main character "is the time machine," his time travel is limited because he can't visit any time before he was born.

In time travel fiction, you need some real guideposts or barriers in which the characters must travel in order to make the concept believable to the average reader.

3. The standard paradox: You can't go into the past and kill your own grandfather

If one goes back into time and kills a grandparent or parent, then the normal time line would be altered so you would not have been born, which means you couldn't have killed your grandfather, which (logically) means that you will be born. This "grandfather paradox" is hard to resolve.

In 1985,  Igor Novikov of the University of Moscow used quantum mechanical arguments to develop what has become known as the "self-consistency theorem." Quantum randomness must obey well-established laws, and Novikov showed that the probability of producing a different future with a time machine was zero. The theory is that you might "try" to alter past events, but time itself will not allow you to change any history. All of your attempts would be thwarted by the rules of the universe. You would be the coyote to the road runner.

If you can never change history, this would mean that choices in the present set in concrete that could never be changed.  Concurrently, one could argue that time travel itself would do nothing to change the future because the past is irrevocable. Nothing you would do in the past would be applicable when you returned to the present since the past had not changed. If you use the wisdom, knowledge or events of the past to make current decisions, one could also say that choice was influenced by the experience or still random causation which may or may not have happened anyway.

4. There are limits to a person's free will.

If one cannot change the past, the same would seem to be true in time travel to the future. This would mean that the time history line is already be written - - - fate, predetermined by the universe, and not by any human decision. Future events are predetermined in the single universe theory.

People must succumb to their destiny even if  you don't know what the future will bring; it certainly seems like you've got free choice in your life actions.  But if you traveled in time to see the future, the time traveler has already seen what his destiny is, then the future is already written.  The future is then locked in stone. Making that self-consistent future play out is one of the great challenges of time-travel fiction. 

Theorists compare this to the grandfather paradox. The pool ball example is cited as a paradox. If you shoot a pool ball into a time machine and it returns just a moment before you make the shot, it would block your original shot thereby preventing the original action (shot) from entering the time machine in the first place. But since the ball made it to the time machine means that it will return without interrupting the shot (such as coming back at a slightly different angle.) As a result, pool balls are forced to succumb to their destiny, so can people. Time travelers may have a feeling of free choice where none really exists.

It seems that LOST broke all four of these fundamental time travel rules. LOST showed us a parallel or alternative sideways universe. There was no explanation of when the island time machine was created when our Losties began to time skip from the 1950s to the 1970s back to the present. The frozen donkey wheel was thought to have been the mechanism to "hide" the island or move it in space, but not necessarily in time. The wheel being stuck (causing the skips) would mean that Locke may not have been able to get back down the well to a relevant time period (because he was alternatively skipping) that would allow time to return to normal. This time skip only affected a few but not all of the people alive in the same place as the time travelers. The time travelers went back in time before they were born. Daniel was killed by his mother which should have been a paradox where Daniel would have never been born or arrived on the island. And the concept of free will is nullified in time travel to the future since things are set in stone. None of the time travelers can change their fate. There was no free will vs. faith choice. The events in flashback 1974 could not have influenced or changed the island present. But it seemed it did.

And that is the problem with the LOST time travel arc. It is a mess. If you are going to promulgate a non-standard time travel theory, you need to clearly explain its rules so it makes some logical sense.  You can have a series that breaks or changes these rules. For example, Doctor Who proposes multiple independent universes. The Doctor's machine, TARDIS, can displace time and space. He can influence and change outcomes of events  both past and future (so it seems) but there are certain "fixed" points in time that even he cannot alter. But the key piece of the story is that the Doctor has special wisdom of a Time Lord who is the master, guardian, gatekeeper and overlord to the time continuum. That gives that series the mythological structure to fly off on acceptable time adventures.

LOST's time travel arc was disappointing on all levels. It did not take into consideration standard time travel methodology. It failed to explain how it worked. It made huge inconsistencies in how it affected individual time travelers and the people around them in an illogical fashion. And worst of all, the time travel story line had no impact on the ending.