WISHES

IN the Wizard of Oz, the main characters were seeking something important in their lives: a heart, courage or a brain. The journey to resolve a character deficits was part of the LOST process.

What was the one thing lacking in each of the main character's make-up? What was the one thing that they were desperately looking for?

Locke: family.
Hurley: courage.
Kate: responsibility.
Ben: control.
Jack: true love.
Sayid: purpose.
Shannon: acceptance.
Charlie: sacrifice.
Michael: direction.
Walt: parental love.
Sun: acknowledgement.
Jin: wealth.
Claire: understanding.
Boone:  protector role.
Sawyer: accountability.

Did the series give the main characters opportunities to find what they were looking for? Yes.

Did all of the main characters achieve what they were looking for? No.

Character motivations are powerful tools in story telling. But they mirror the motivations of real people in real life. Series like LOST should give the viewer pause to ask the powerful questions:

What was the one thing lacking in each of your make-up? What was the one thing are you desperately looking for? What is your wish?

SCIENCE FAILS WHAT WE TRULY KNOW

"What do we know about the universe?" asked astronomer Bob Berman to a crowded room at IdeaFestival 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. "Why aren't the answers satisfying? Where do they go wrong?"

There's a lot of hard and fast data, he says, but it doesn't always give us the right answers. "It's important to know when science is working," said Berman, "and when it's not."

Berman offered four reasons that our scientific approach to understanding the universe doesn't work, and what we can do about it, according to a Yahoo article:

1. Limited data--Most of the universe is dark energy and the rest is dark matter--and we don't know what that is, said Berman. "We only know what's in our vicinity."

2. Limits to our dualistic logic system--There are two ways we get information, Berman said. Directly and indirectly. In science, the indirect method can work sometimes. But not for everything. "Unless you experience love," Berman said, "you won't know what it is. If you're blind, you won't know the color blue. You need experience. And when it comes to the universe, we run out of symbols." The universe is growing larger, he said, "but what does that mean? We can't picture infinity."

3. Space/time framework--"Space actually is not real," said Berman. "We all have an image of space and time, a framework, but when we look, that space and time may have a questionable reality." Of time, Berman said it's also not real. It's merely "an ordering system that we animals created. And it changes."

4. Consciousness--"Consciousness is the greatest unsolved problem in all of science," said Berman. "In every experiment, we're seeing, thinking, concluding--and it happens in our consciousness. Experiments go differently if we measure them and how we measure them. Where we measure makes a difference. It depends on us as observers." And while we "continue to study the brain and how it works, this doesn't answer the question of human experience," said Berman.

Berman believes that science is not approaching the universe from the right angle. We continue to study the Big Bang, he said, but it "doesn't compute with us. In our everyday lives we don't see puppies and lawn furniture popping out of nothingness. A universe out of nothingness? How could that be? How could we possibly know what things were like before the universe was the size of a grapenut?" And even if we pin down the Big Bang, we still can't comprehend the infiniteness of the universe, he said. "We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe inside of us."

"We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe inside of us. We're working on the assumption that studying the parts will give us the whole," Berman said. "That may not be true."

So what's the answer? "If our thought process doesn't work with the macro-universe," Berman said, "the answers don't make sense. It means we're asking the wrong questions."

In terms of what we can ever know about the universe, "we're not really making progress," Berman said. "We're not knowing more and more."

The secret, he said, might lie in recognizing that the thing we are looking for is obvious rather than hidden; present rather than absent.

COMPUTER ERROR

The BBC recently reported that computers have a problem with a number, a large number, specifically the number 2,147,483,647 – which is the maximum positive value of a 32-bit signed register. A computer calculating a value higher than that number crashes. The resulting disaster could shut down a guidance system, a launch sequence or orbital probe or in the case of the European Space Administration, the loss of a rocket.

LOST was keen on hyping the Numbers as a key component to unlocking the series mysteries.

4-8-15-16-23-42.

Hmmmmmm.

If you multiply the Numbers you get 7,418,880, which is within the range of the highest maximum value in computer science.

But as one number it would be 4,815,162,342,  which is OUTSIDE the range of the highest maximum value in computer science.

But if you did not input the Numbers every 108 minutes, the Hatch containment field would fail and the island would experience the purple flash (time-space disruption).

There was never a clear connection between the Numbers and the main characters since the Numbers were used as the countdown timer  "prior" to the assignment by Jacob of the Candidates.

But in a circular view, that is not true. When Desmond used the fail safe key, the island purple flashed sending several of the Candidates back to 1970s. Those Candidates, already being on the island, would have been assigned their Number.

But not all the Candidates were in 1974 Dharma. Jack and Kate were thrown back in time to meet up with  Sawyer, who was a security officer living with Juliet, with his crew of Hurley, Miles and Jin. Daniel Faraday then arrived at the island from the Dharma HQ in Michigan.  Sawyer tried to recruit Jack to operate on young Ben, who had been shot by Sayid. So in the 1970s, before "the Incident" at the Hatch which would later require the countdown timer, Hurley (4), Sawyer (15), Sayid (16), Jack (23) and Jin (42). Locke (8) was the only missing "Number" prior to the Incident.

But Locke himself had bounced around as far back as 1954, and met with Richard Alpert. So his memory could be considered a presence in the 1970s Dharma.

So the Numbers, as a representation of Jacob's Candidates, were used as a "fail safe" device to hold back the electromagnetic energy. As such the Candidates, through their Numbers, were used as part of a "shield" mechanism to hold back the energy. For what purpose? We can only assume that if the energy was not contained, MIB could be "released" or "escape" the island which would lead to the destruction of the universe.

But with the Incident happening essentially AFTER Desmond used the fail safe key which set in motion the Candidates going into the past which would later create the Hatch protocols BEFORE the Incident,  we have a serious time travel paradox.

But if the spiritual spell casting background of ancient Egypt is a guide, the Numbers could cast a spell on the smoke monster to keep it at bay. MIB's adoption of Locke's physical form and memories must have been its attempt to break "the code" or barrier of the island so it could leave.

But then the fatal blow to MIB's plans was caused not by the Numbers or the Candidates represented by them (even though Jack (23) fought MIB in the end), it was Kate (51) who delivered the final death blow by shooting Flocke on the cliff.

So what were the Numbers/Candidates symbolic of? A fatal computer error in the universe? A pathway to parallel time travel universes to avoid a paradox? The gateway code to time-space? Or a spiritual spell to keep demons at bay?