RELATIVE

Scientists have used Einstein's Theory of Relativity to calculate how time is measured in deep space flights. The conclusion is itself a paradox. For a deep space mission, the astronauts may age much more slowly traveling at the speed of light. For example, they may age 28 years on a light speed travel across the universe, but return to Earth 1,300 years later.

The fact that deep space travel can cause a return trip to take 1,300 years in "local" time explains why aliens have never returned to Earth.

Another factor in deep space travel is that human beings do not do well with forces over 1 g. We are basically water bags that can pop under pressure. Scientists think the best deep space travelers would be spiny, thin, small alien grays.

As private space firms have advertised in their speculative missions to colonize Mars, even solar system space travel is a one way street.  If you plan to go out into deep space, the chance of your returning home is near zero.

Which brings us to a hypothesis in LOST.

Some believe the island may have been some lost alien space craft. If true, then Jacob, the island guardian would have been the alien pilot and his brother his co-pilot. If these space aliens came from a distant solar system with advanced technology, they could have crash landed on Earth without the means of repairing their ship.

The clues of being space aliens comes in the form of their physical presence. Jacob and especially MIB appear to be shape-shifting smoke monsters. They can change their physical structure, morph into human beings or monsters. This would make sense for deep space travelers to avoid the pitfalls of human bodies. If these alien travelers were not humanoids but energy beings, they could survive deep space flight.

A further clue on the island aliens is that Jacob's narrative that people who come to the island are from "shipwrecks."  This mirrors his own situation. By bringing people to the island looking for a solution to his problem, Jacob cleverly puts the humans in the same position he is in: lost, looking for a way "home."

And the human beings brought to the island have been a clever bunch. Dharma and the military brought vast resources including nuclear technology and experimentation on electromagnetic properties including time travel. Perhaps these Earth technologies were being used to try to re-boot the space craft island so Jacob could indeed return "home" as MIB kept saying to the castaways. But MIB continues to get frustrated with the humans who want to take their advanced technology and use it to increase their own power on Earth. In order to control them, Jacob and MIB use human history of "gods" including borrowing ancient Egyptian rites, to control the humans on the island.

In essence, the series concludes not with the humans getting home, but the aliens finding a way to end their existence on a distant planet far away from their home. After centuries of failed attempts to get their ship technology working, Jacob and MIB apparently release themselves from their species protections (the immortality we saw during the show) in order to cease to exist. In that way, their alien technology does not corrupt the Earth society as they had found humans to be barbaric and crude in their emotional states.

DIFFERENTIAL TIME

Scientists are perplexed by the fact that our Milky Way galaxy is traveling significantly faster than the two adjacent galaxies.  Under the Big Bang Theory, all matter should be traveling away from the initial core at the same velocity. However, there is something at work that makes our galaxy behave differently. Some call the unknown mechanism "the Great Attractor," pulling us faster than our neighbors.

Some speculate that it may be a concentration of dark matter or dark energy that is the force that is moving galaxies around like ping pong balls in a steady breeze. Others think it may have to do with gravitational pulls from unknown objects or forces that create gravity itself.

If we know that our system is traveling faster in space, thence faster in space-time, than another galaxy, that would mean that travel in space (and the time to travel in space) is not universally linear.

It is one of those wordy math problems about two trains leaving the station at the same time, but traveling at different speeds but having different stops. Which trains arrives at the end station first?

But this has a place in LOST lore. Daniel's time-rocket experiments from the freighter to the island showed that the island was moving away from the ship. Which was a problem for a stationary island. If island time, and Daniel observed the light being "different," was moving at a different rate than the rest of Earth, we have the same problem as scientists have with the Milky Way issue.

The localized time difference led to theories about the island being an anomaly. It was either a space-time portal, or on event horizon of a stable micro-black hole. It was also thought as an interdimensional bridge between universes.

If there are parallel universes, what type of matter would be between its layers? Is this the area where dark matter resides?  Does the parallel universes masses have gravitational pulls through the separation zones into our own universe (thus explaining the speed differences between galaxies)?

If you look at Earth itself, its crust sits mostly stationary on the surface while tectonic plates are moved about through the pressure and movement of the hot magma at the planet's core.  If our universe sits on the crust of known space, the parallel universe's forces could be equated with the subsurface geologic properties which have a direct effect on the surface plates.

If the Milky Way is traveling at 2.2 million km/hour in space, why do we feel time is a slow 60 minutes in an hour? Our perception of time comes from the solar cycle of the sun around our planet. We do not feel or sense that we are moving at speeds 2,500 times faster than a jet airliner because everything around us is traveling at the same relative speed. We only become aware of the differences in relative speed when something is slower or faster than our current position. When one is jogging at 1 mile/10 minutes and a bird flies by and zooms off into the distance, we know that the bird is traveling faster than we are at that moment. But if we are traveling 55 mph in a car and we overtake a bird flying down the road, we know that we are traveling faster than that creature.

The same must hold true in space. The Milky Way is the car and the neighboring galaxies are the birds being left behind in our wake.

But this opens up a practical question. If our galaxy is moving away faster from adjoining galaxies, would it not take more force, effort and time to move against the forces that is driving us a part? It would be swimming against a strong current.

If Einstein was correct and the speed of light is the fastest anything can go in space, would someone traveling to our galaxy make it quicker to us then us trying to travel to them?

And when would arrive at a place that is traveling slower in space time, would we have aged slower or become younger? It is an odd tangent that space travel could be the real "Fountain of Youth." Aging is a measure of the passage of time. But what happens when one reverses the process of time in the aging process? Do you become immortal? Is it like Eloise Hawking - - - or Bill Murray in Groundhog Day - - - being alive long enough to know everything?

But as NASA scientists have said, any trips to Mars would essentially be one-way missions. The amount of fuel to propel a massive space craft with supplies to set up living quarters on Mars would be prohibitive of a return trip. But even against that death sentence, thousands of people signed up for a private colonization of Mars. Why? Because they must believe their time on Earth is finite and uneventful while a trip to Mars would be immortal history of space exploration.

Did the LOST characters stumble upon a remnant of ancient space exploration disguised as the island? Perhaps. Nothing is outside the realm of possibility when it came to the divergent streams of show plot and story lines.

WARPING SPACE-TIME

One of the mysteries of the island was its ability to shift in time and space.

On June 30th, 1905, Albert Einstein started a revolution with the publication of theory of Special Relativity.  This theory, among other things, stated that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the source. In 1915, he followed this up with the publication of his theory of General Relativity, which asserted that gravity has a warping effect on space-time. For over a century, these theories have been an essential tool in astrophysics, explaining the behavior of the Universe on the large scale.

However, since the 1990s, astronomers have been aware of the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. In an effort to explain the mechanics behind this, suggestions have ranged from the possible existence of an invisible Dark Energy to the possibility that Einstein’s field equations of General Relativity.


As published in Universe Today, scientists from Japan using the Fiber Multi-Object Spectrograph (FMOS) on the Subaru Telescope created the deepest 3-D map of the Universe to date. All told, this map contains some 3,000 galaxies and encompasses a volume of space measuring 13 billion light-years.

Experimental results looking at the expansion of the universe, in comparison to that predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity in green. Credit: Kavli IPMU/Okumura et al.

As part of their effort to ascertain the origins of cosmic acceleration, this project relies on data collected by the Subaru telescope to create a survey that monitors the redshift of galaxies. The expansion of the universe has been accelerating since the universe entered its dark energy era, at redshift z≈0.4 (roughly 5 billion years ago). Within the framework of  Einstein's general relativity,  an accelerating expansion can be accounted for by a positive value of the cosmological constant.

If gravity can warp space-time in a way to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace, then this can be the sci-fi basis for the island's time and space shifts. It would also mean that the frozen donkey wheel tie in to the island's unique electromagnetic energy could be complex or wrong. The Hatch was the station that kept the EM energy levels in check. It was the FDW that was turned to created a different result: time teleportation of matter (abet, selective matter and people which is a real continuity problem). If the island EM was intersecting a universal stream of dark energy gravity, that could explain why the island acted beyond the normal boundaries of Earth's physics. This intersection of two different properties could lead to the creation of micro-universes within the present universe. This warping of space-time at a localized level would have been of great value to the scientific, military and industrial world.

DARK MATTERS

Science knows about the element called dark matter. It can be observed by the gravitation pull of other objects. It makes up about a quarter of the universe. But science does not know what it really does.

Some researchers have tried to postulate that dark matter may attach itself to dying pulsars, in such a fashion that the density becomes so great that a black hole is created in the universe.

Scientists also believe that at the edge of any black hole, where the gravitational forces are the greatest, physics and notions of time and space are out of whack.  Even a pinpoint black hole singularity could disrupt time and space.

These are known concepts. Using known science concepts is a good basis for science fiction.

LOST posters have often looked to black holes, dark matter and strange energy as a basis of trying to explain the underlying events in the series. The show's time travel events became quite problematic. Even the island's "re-sets" have inconsistent triggers which does not lead to a clear explanation.

Humans are curious; we want answers to mysteries.

What is the universe? What is our role in the universe? What is life? Is there something after life? Why can't we take all the chemicals found in a human body and mix up a human being in the lab?

To explain sporadic time events on the island, one must assume that the cork has to be shifted in some manner to release the built up energy. However, the Swan computer station was not tied directly the heart of the island. In fact, the cork was a large stone, not a mechanical device. So was the Swan station a pressure value to release energy used to keep the light source in check? And why would anyone need to do that anyway? The light source was on the island long before humans. Did the ancient Egyptians first harness its power, i.e. ability to time travel through space portals, in the quest to actually get the after life? That makes some sense in the realm of the burial temple rituals. But in order to create such a time riff, one must have the pull of a black hole singularity.

So it is possible that the island is the bridge between a dark matter pocket creating a black hole and the unique electromagnetic light source (the Big Bang so to speak) from which all life in the universe got its component parts. So is the island the location of a possible Second Big Bang?

We think the island was returned to balance when Jack died. So the existing universe would have been saved from destruction. But then again, a second parallel universe was created from the island which we called the sideways world - - - one in which Desmond was aware of on the island prior to his awakening in the sideways plane of existence. So the fabric of normal space time had to have been altered by the island time shifts. Then, was the sideways truly an after life experience, or merely an alternative dimension populated by the memories of the island castaways? A echo, a memory, a fiction created by the disruption of the known universe carried about on the nodes of dark matter.

LOVECRAFTIAN

According to author H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, somewhere sunken in the South Pacific there is a “nightmare corpse-city” called R’lyeh, “built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.” 

In his house in this city, the great old god Cthulhu waits, dead and dreaming, for his return to power. In a story, a crew of sailors accidentally discover a risen part of the city, an island with a “coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry,” accidentally wake Cthulhu from his sleep, and are either killed or driven mad.

 Exploring the island, the sailors soon discover that “all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset,” and they struggle to comprehend and describe their surroundings. “One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable,” one of the sailors, Gustaf Johansen, wrote in his log. Even when they discover a simple door, the sailors couldn’t tell if it “lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door” because the “geometry of the place was all wrong.”

Of course, none of it—the sailors, the city, the island, the dead-dreaming god—are real. If it was, though, would science be able to explain the weird geometry of the city? Benjamin Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician at the University of New Brunswick, tries to bring fiction into science with a “unified theory of Cthulhu.”

After poring over the clues and descriptions left by Lovecraft’s characters and employing his “mad general relativity skills,” Tippett thinks that the geometry of R’lyeh was all wrong—not because the architecture curves and angles in strange ways, but because of the space the city occupies. R’lyeh, he says, lies in a “region of anomalously curved spacetime,” and the bizarre geometry of the buildings and changing alignment of the horizon are the consequences of the “gravitational lensing of images therein.” 

In a region of curved spacetime, Tippett explains, light doesn’t travel in reliably straight trajectories, so objects beyond the curved region appear warped and skewed, and the relative positions of two objects, or the flatness of a large object, in the region are difficult to discern. A visitor to R’lyeh, he says, would “see the outside world (and other distant objects upon the island) as if through a large fishbowl. Thus, the horizon would no longer be reliably straight, and the sun and moon would swing wildly through the sky depending on one’s position.”

Tippett thinks his “spacetime bubble hypothesis” can also explain the oddities of how time is perceived in R’lyeh, and maybe even address the “central myth of the Cthulhu cult.” Time, he says, passes slower inside an area of curved spacetime than it does outside of it. This time dilation is probably what allowed the sailor Johansen to “survive adrift at sea for nearly two weeks … in a state of helpless dementia.” It could also mean that Cthulhu, whose cultists describe him as dead and dreaming, neither alive nor truly dead, is simply “in a position where it does not feel the passage of time.” At the center of the spacetime bubble, the god could wait, unchanging, for aeons.

As to what caused or created the curved spacetime bubble surrounding R’lyeh, Tippett can only guess. “An exotic type of matter with which human science is entirely unfamiliar is required for such a geometry to exist,” he says. “Indeed, this is the very species of energy which is theoretically required to build a warp drive or a cloaking device. Only a people capable of crossing vast cosmic distances could have constructed Johansen’s bubble.”

Bubble. Spacetime. Time dilation from inside and outside the island. Exotic type of matter.

These are all elements in LOST.

Was the hidden foundation of the LOST mythology from Lovecraft?

As said in Hollywood, nothing is really new.

Is the smoke monster a version of Cthulhu, a dead and dreaming god?

It is a possible explanation. It has tangential elements of exotic powers, unexplained monster, and a time drift that defies conventional science.

The smoke monster is nothing we had ever seen. It takes the form of smoke, then transforms matter into various forms, including humans. It has the ability to read minds, reshape memories, and absorb personalities. It some ways it is parasitic. In other ways, it is intellectually aware.

Or the smoke monster could be the island god's leaking subconscious, a semi-dream state creating or interacting with castaways which shipwreck on its shores, and in turn, disturbs its eternal slumber.

If one part of the island is in actual dream state, the human beings on its surface are the new threads in the island's fantasy world. The castaways don't know that they are real elements in a non-human's dream. And with dreams, they can turn into nightmares. Also, dreams can often overcome the dreamer's normal moral compass and governors, and turn quite dark. 

But this premise does not explain the ending to the series. If the smoke monster was part of the island god's dream state, how could it be "killed?"  Why would even want to be killed?  The only way to stop a dream is to wake up (another strong theme in the sideways world).  So it is possible, that shipwrecked islanders came under a dream like spell while on the island, interacting with the unseen consciousness of the Lovecraftian god. 

Two possible outcomes of killing or waking up a slumbering god: first, it is angry and kills everyone who is on the island, or second, it is benevolent and gives each person their own "dreams" in the alternative afterlife world. Except, not everyone was happy and content in the sideways world. And why keep the island events hidden, repressed and unknown in the sideways world? Was it a final test?

Or was it just another level of the dream?

IS IT POSSIBLE?

Is it possible that someone will be able to take the LOST story and re-work it into a unified climax of the desperate, tangential plots?

Yes, if someone took the time and effort to re-edit the series into chronological order (which I have not seen except the first two hours), then in the buried archeological pit of the scripts there is a lost treasure that ties everything together.

In order to tie every piece of the LOST puzzle together, one will have to consider suspending belief but not to the point of irrational McGuffins. The best science fiction has at its core science principles "extended" by theoretical advancement.

For example, is it possible to survive a mid-air plane separation at 30,000 feet? No. Is it possible to survive a free fall from 9,000 feet (as shown in the Others centric episode showing the crash from Ben's perspective)? Perhaps, but unlikely. Is it possible that since Desmond did not enter the numbers promptly, causing a system failure and release of electromagnetic energy, that the unique EM properties could have acted as parachutes or pillows for the survivors who landed alive on the island? That could be a possibility. With the Desmond error causing an electromagnetic incident, is it possible that based on the FDW's ability to harness the EM to shift the island in time and space, that the EM discharge selectively carried the survivors into a different time, space or dimension (including the afterlife as in Dante's Inferno)? That could be a greater possibility since it links together more key elements of the story mythology.

And this is how it could be possible to use the story clues, stated science principles, island factors, and cause-and-effect relationships to build a detailed model of what actually happened to the characters in a unified story that would tie all the loose ends.

In order to accomplish something this grand, one will need to extract the core mythology elements and make them core building blocks from which "the answers" can logically be found for the show's mysteries. There truly needs to be story rules to avoid continuity issues.

It will be complex, confusing and frustrating. For example, the writers had no consistent concept of "time."  It was linear. Then it was circular. Then it was classified as a moving stream. Each one of these time concepts is different. And when the writers dropped the bomb in the sideways world having "no past, no present, no future, but just now," how does one deal with characters moving forward in a space with no time at all? The "now" is not the present because the present represents the future minus the past. Unless the after life principle is that souls live in a null space, then why would they appear to live "normal" lives along a progressive time line?

Even if one can forge through the serious stuff, can one weave an explanation that would appease, delight and answer all the questions of the die-hard fan? Probably not. And that is why no one has really tried to tackle this ambitious project.

LOGO

The slowly spinning and drifting LOST opening credit logo.

In stark black and white, a color theme in the series.

Blackness as in the vast void of space. The unknown dimensions for which time and space resides.

Darkness, another theme of the series. Good against evil; science against faith.

The word "lost," which infers definitions like misguided, fear, troubled, misplaced, forfeited, neglected, fallen, irredeemable, irreclaimable, irretrievable, past hope, past praying for, vanished, strayed, condemned, cursed, doomed. All words which could describe elements in the series.

Is the LOST logo opening the perfect symbol for the show?

It probably can mean that viewers got "lost" in the various mysteries, twists, Easter eggs, red herrings, blind corners, pseudo-science, theories, counter-theories and relationship twists.

It probably can mean that the producers-writers got "lost" in their flashback format, their editing techniques to drive up emotions or drama, background details, cliffhangers and supernatural elements to concentrate on a coherent final season script.

It may also in the annals of television history a "lost" opportunity to be the greatest show ever; one with total critical, peer and viewer overwhelming approval.

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

While the concept of "suspended animation" is in the realm of science fiction,  some scientists are testing out a similar process in order to explore health care options to long space travel.

They prefer to call it “emergency preservation and resuscitation.” Basically, their goal is to suspend life to keep patients alive during dangerous operations through the use of internal cooling. A patient’s blood is completely removed and replaced with a cold saline solution, slowing down metabolism and reducing oxygen needs. The body cools to about 50ºF, basically inducing hypothermia. This will supposedly help buy time for important surgery for patients suffering from a massive heart attack or a shooting. A heart-lung bypass machine restores blood circulation and oxygenation for resuscitation

The trials are currently being tested on 10 patients expected to die from their injuries, with survival rates less than 7%. For now, this is only for those who have “suffered cardiac arrest after severe traumatic injury, with their chest cavity open and having lost at least half their blood already,” according to CNET’s Michelle Starr. The procedure has previously been tested on pigs successfully, though some pigs needed their heart jump-started.

If successful,  this procedure would benefit healthcare in the long run, but astronauts who want to travel through space for months at a time. For the biggest problem with deep space travel is fuel and food supplies for the crew. If one is in a state of suspended animation, the theory goes that you don't have to metabolize normal foods in order to sustain life. Your body slows down to the bare minimum of existence.

It may be a long way off to get an acceptable success rate. But at 7 percent, it seems too low to be a workable solution. Then, look at the LOST characters. Did even 7 percent of the characters survive the island?

What if the characters were really test subjects in a state of suspended animation, but the network of monitors and feedback loops cross connects everyone into a community consciousness?

What if the characters were actually deep space astronauts on a mission, but in their semi-coma state begin to die off during the journey. As such, a psychological barrier forms with the remaining souls - - - an idyllic island mental setting to process their fate: death.

Or it could be a similar journey of dead souls to the after life (sideways world).

A NEW SCIENCE THEORY

One of the things that kept us commentators up all night during the original series run was trying to find an explanation for the island time travel.

It still remains elusive.

The Alcubierre drive or Alcubierre metric  is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity   as proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, by which a spacecraft could achieve faster than light  travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (example, negative mass) could be created. Rather than exceeding the speed of light within its local frame of reference,  a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel. This is the theory behind Star Trek warp drive.

Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal space time; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space.  Although the metric proposed by Alcubierre is mathematically valid in that it is consistent with the Einstein field equations, it may not be physically meaningful or indicate that such a drive could be constructed. The proposed mechanism of the Alcubierre drive implies a negative energy density  and therefore requires exotic matter,  so if exotic matter with the correct properties does not exist then it could not be constructed. However, at the close of his original paper.

Alcubierre based some of his ideas on  analyzing traversable wormholes  that the Casimir vacuum  between parallel plates could fulfill the negative-energy requirement for the Alcubierre drive. Another possible issue is that although the Alcubierre metric is consistent with general relativity, general relativity does not incorporate quantum mechanics, and some physicists have presented arguments to suggest that a theory of quantum gravity which merged the two theories would eliminate those solutions in general relativity which allow for backwards time travel of which the Alcubierre drive is one.

If one goes back to look at the numerous community posts on the subject, you would find references to the Casimir Effect, wormholes, warp drive spacecraft, as possible elements to the LOST time travel puzzle.

Dark energy appears to be the unknown substance that is a part of space itself; it is thought to explain why space is always expanding outward. To harness an energy like this is one of the theoretical basis for time travel since the expansion (or contraction) of space is the fundamental element of warp space drive.

The Fermi Lab has been colliding matter for years to create very small exotic matter through the burst of gamma rays. Gamma Rays are the greatest energy concentration force. However, capture, storage and application of gamma rays as an energy source is unproven. However, contact with other matter can generate electromagnetic fields. The faster than light speed could be accomplished when the dark energy or gamma rays come into contact with any other matter; the reaction between the two phases could generate more energy because it would come all the mass of the elements into pure energy.

Black holes have such intense gravity that, once inside their event horizons, not even light can escape. Outside of the event horizon,  the hole's intense gravity draws matter into a disk and raises it to very high energies. The disk emits lots of light on its own and sends out jets of high energy particles that emit even more as they interact with the surrounding interstellar material.

It was thought that the radiation emitted by the black hole starts driving off the surrounding matter, effectively cutting off its own food supply, called the Eddington limit. But now, researchers have found that the Eddington limit isn't an absolute cap on the amount of energy a black hole can emit out into its surroundings. Their observations suggest that this particular black hole sends out almost as much energy in the form of accelerated particles.

In theory, the use of pull of a wormhole or black hole with associated intense energy could create the warp bubble around a spacecraft. However, the math states that the encapsulated craft would need to be shielded from intense heat greater than that our the center of our sun.

If we start to piece together some of these elements, we can possibly see the light (literally and figuratively). The light cave may be in reality a gamma ray generator (natural or alien). The disruptive electromagnetic release (which destroyed the Hatch) is caused by the gamma rays to interact with other matter. The safeguard to keep the gamma ray generator and other matter from coming together could be the efficient placement of a tiny worm hole. A tiny wormhole in front of a spacecraft (or in this case, the island is the craft), could bend space time around these opposing fields to create time travel jumps.

I can guarantee that none of the LOST writers ever thought of this. The series did not dwell on scientific explanations. It relied on vague illusions. Their time skips were thrown out to create "separation" anxieties among the various surviving 815ers.

UNIVERSAL ILLUSION

Nature News had a recent article which poses the question of whether the Universe is merely a holographic illusion.  There is scientific debate on how the universe operates, with string theory being one of the explanations. But science has trouble verifying its various theories.

A team of physicists has provided some evidence that our Universe could be just one big holographic projection. In 1997, theorical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that in his model of the Universe, which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues reported evidence that may prove Maldacena’s conjecture is true. Hyakutake computed the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. He and his collaborators also separately calculated the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.

“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena,  who did not contribute to the Japanese team's work. “(The findings) are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory," Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”
“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.

Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.

The concept of "duality" was present in the LOST series. In fact, duality has been a theme of mankind throughout its history. Ancient people thought in terms of a dual system: heaven and earth, gods and man, fire and water, time and space, good and bad, etc. There was also duality taught in religious believes between the two worlds: material and spiritual. Ancient Egyptians took the concept further to state that after death, a person's soul splits into different forms, the ba and ka,  to journey through the underworld. So it is not surprising that human beings view the world around them through the concept of duality.

The LOST story structure wound up to be in two dual planes of existence: the island and the sideways worlds. Was one real and the other a projection? Were both real but in different time space? Or were both projections of the same universe but reflected back as illusions? The parallel that cutting edge science is still cannot figure out the universe, and LOST fans still cannot agree on what the show's main premise was is somewhat comforting and troubling at the same time.

NOT WHAT IT SEEMS

THE ISLAND WAS NOT AN ISLAND.

That should have been the tabloid headline when the freighter blew up and the helicopter was going back to the beach to make an emergency landing. The island, in a flash of light, disappeared, leaving only a small ripple on the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

An island is the volcanic upheaval from the ocean floor of lava rock which then reaches past the surface of the ocean water.  Islands are anchored on the ocean floor.

When the island disappeared without displacing any great water mass, we knew then that the island was not an island. It could not be.

From fan maps and dialog in the series, the island was approximately 12 miles wide and 18 miles long with the Hydra Island two miles off shore, with a dimension of 2 square miles. If one calculates the surface area of the island, it would be approximately 220 square miles.

The Pacific Ocean is 35, 797 feet in depth from the surface to the floor. Therefore, the island would have had real Earth dimensions of 12 miles x 18 miles x 6.77 miles or 1,462.32 cubic miles of mass.

The sudden disappearance of the island would have created an instantaneous hole in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The island surface area of 220 miles x ocean depth of 6.77 miles equals 1,489 sq. miles of water. The entire mass of the Pacific Ocean is 96, 658, 000 sq miles so the island disappearance would have displaced a large amount of water, as the surrounding ocean would rush into the void, and thereby creating a huge geyser and tsunami.

 However, we did not observe the expected violent water rush filling a massive air space in the middle of the ocean. Therefore, the island did not displace the expected amount of water.

The island was not an island, but a floating structure. There is other evidence for this fact, such as the Daniel rocket experiment that showed that the island was moving away from the freighter.

Another piece of evidence was the sideways memories of the island and its artifacts being shown at the bottle of the ocean, encrusted with corral. This would suggest that the island "sank" to the bottom of the ocean.

So we have an island on earth which is not an earth island in mass or physics.

Theorists have proposed that the island was a disguise for some alien technology such as space ship or a star gate (a portal into other dimensions). 

Other theorists believe that the island is an actual life form. It has a "heart" of life force and unique properties that allows it to move about in both time and space. It would be like a space tortoise landing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with its back turned into a tropical island over time.

Other theorists believe the island is a transition station between Earth and the after life, a gateway that souls need to traverse on their way to heaven.

No matter what theory one subscribes to, it is clear that the island was a floating mass and not a "true" island was we know them.

PYRAMIDS

The science community will always have debates about ancient history. One of the most diverse debate is how various ancient cultures from around the world created the same type of massive structures when they had no contact with each other.

Science researchers have found massive pyramid structures in Egypt, central China, Mexico and South America. Some archaeologists believe that these ancient people found that stepping back stones to form a pyramid would be the easiest way to make a large structure because its base is wider at the bottom. However, others point out that the same people did not make pyramid shaped houses, granaries or other basic structures (went more to a box form of walls.)

Then there is a debate about what the pyramids purpose was to those ancient civilizations. Most believe that these towering structures were used as astronomical observatories to align important cosmic events such as the solstice or equinox to the planting or harvesting cycles of the land. Many believe that these structures served as the centerpiece of community rituals, including religious ceremonies. Other historians believe that some of these structures were made to show the power and authority of the king against his own people and other tribal rivals. Pyramids were symbols of power, wealth, control and status.

In Egypt, the consensus is that the pyramids were used as tombs for the kings. However, no modern science expedition found any Pharoah remains inside the pyramid itself; the temple and burial complex usually was found around the main pyramid structure.

The pyramids are tied to ritual beliefs. Apparently the Pharaoh believed, like any commoner among his people, that every living body was inhabited by a double, or ka, which need not die with the breath; and that the ka would survive all the more completely if the flesh were preserved against hunger, violence and decay.

The pyramids of Egypt, by its height, its form and its position, sought stability as a means to traverse death; and except for its square corners it took the natural form that any homogeneous group of solids would take if allowed to fall unimpeded to the earth. The symbolic nature of the pyramid pointing to the sky, or aligned with the constellations, are clues to the ancient philosophies.

But most science teams cannot understand how these massive structures were built. Even today, with modern machinery and crane technologies, it would be very difficult for the 2013 construction crews to build a pyramid with such precision and in the time frame that the ancients completed their work. So the speculation is that the ancients had help or technology that we cannot comprehend. Pyramids are a lasting mystery hidden in plain site.

In LOST, we go into the walled temple structure with two outside court yards. We are taken into the magical pool inside the temple, where there are columns of Egyptian hieroglyphs which appear to be prayers to the underworld gods. But it is interesting to note, we never see an actual pyramid on the island. What happened to it? Or why was it not built?  The people brought to the island once built the massive Taweret statue that was destroyed with the Black Rock hurricane ship wreck.

If the pyramids were the "space ships" for the spiritual soul to go to the underworld or heavens, then that could explain why there was no pyramid on the island: it was not needed. The island was the destination. Except, that does not explain why modern men who did not share ancient Egyptian beliefs, would have this island was their destination, alive or dead.

REVIEW: THEORIES PART 3

In the next examination of the popular theories prior to Season 6, a lesser viewed notion that the series was about the Island as a mothership.

This theory ties in with the deep American notion that the Rosewell UFO story was true. And plays into the conspiracy theories that surround most government dark projects.

This theory speculates that the island is not an island. We know that the island does not act like a Pacific land mass: it moves, it cannot be seen from the air, it can disappear without displacing a gallon of ocean water, it moves through both time and space at different rates than Earth.

It was called a "snow globe" by Desmond because those on the island could not go through its outer invisible barrier.

Further, the high tech science experiments conducted on the island further bolstered the notion that the supernatural elements inferred that a supernatural race of beings were controlling everything from behind the curtain. In Star Trek, the episode called "The Cage" explored a superior intellectual race viewing human behavior by capturing several star ship crew members to observe human behavior. Likewise, some speculate that the "coincidence" that all the 815 passengers had past connections and/or common personal issues too good to be not forced together by a third party.

As a result, the main characters were “Abducted by Aliens.” The island is not part of Earth. It could be cloaked in a stealth mode between our time and the alien's time.  The survivors may no longer on Planet Earth, as the island is a space ship that re-creates Earth like a holodeck, so the aliens can take back these human beings as examples for further experimentation, or be part of an alien collection such as a zoo exhibit.

The smoke monster, as a high tech alien security system to keep the exhibit pieces on the island, is an explanation for the strange events on the island. It would appear that all the Dharma stations could have been set up to keep the human captives "busy" and pre-occupied so they don't realize that they have left their own solar system.

Early in the series run, Damon Lindelof shot down this theory.  “There are no spaceships. There isn't any time travel,” he told Sci-FiWire.com. However, he also indicated that there was no purgatory, but the cast wound up in purgatory in the end. The series also featured both mental and physical time travel by various characters. The showrunners have always been inconsistent with their defense of the series against fan speculation to the point of being obstructionist. Again, there would have been nothing wrong with a premise that the 815 survivors were "captured" by aliens as the plane was about to crash into the ocean and teleported to their island cage for human behavioral experimentation. In fact, such a premise would actually lead the characters to rebel against a "real" foe instead of the illusory Jacob-MIB stand-off.

GRAVITY WELLS

When Daniel Faraday remarked that the light was different on the island, he was trying to fathom what the island was in both time and space.

Many fans have speculated what or where the island was located: it could have been at the edge of a wormhole, or at an inter-dimensional portal between universes, or a gateway between spiritual realms.

Science fiction writers such as Jules Verne or Mark Twain used time travel as a foundation for stories.  The LOST version of time travel was puzzling because it lead to no where.

As the PBS science show NOVA explained, Sir Issac Newton's most important contribution to science was his mathematical definition of how motion changes with time. He showed that the force causing apples to fall is the same force that drives planetary motions and produces tides. However, Newton was puzzled by the fact that gravity seemed to operate instantaneously at a distance. He admitted he could only describe it without understanding how it worked. Not until Einstein's general theory of relativity was gravity changed from a "force" to the movement of matter along the shortest space in a curved spacetime. The Sun bends spacetime, and spacetime tells planets how to move. For Newton, both space and time were absolute. Space was a fixed, infinite, unmoving metric against which absolute motions could be measured. Newton also believed the universe was pervaded by a single absolute time that could be symbolized by an imaginary clock off somewhere in space. Einstein changed all this with his relativity theories, which was much broader than one iconic equation, fundamentally changed our understanding of time and space.

Einstein's first major contribution to the study of time occurred when he revolutionized physics with his "special theory of relativity" by showing how time changes with motion. Today, scientists do not see problems of time or motion as "absolute" with a single correct answer. Because time is relative to the speed one is traveling at, there can never be a clock at the center of the universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life is the blink of an eye to an alien traveling close to the speed of light. Today, Newtonian mechanics have become a special case within Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein's relativity will eventually become a subset of a new science more comprehensive in its description of the fabric of our universe. (The word "relativity" derives from the fact that the appearance of the world depends on our state of motion; it is "relative.")

Modern sci-fi has demonstrated some of these principles in how a hero changes time. Superman speeds around the earth's gravitational axis in order to reverse time; Star Trek used a similar method to go back in time.

 But in LOST it was not a single event or construct which shows how time changed. We were led to believe that the frozen donkey wheel somehow controlled the island's space time position, and when it got dislodged by Ben's travel, the island began to time skip. This would infer that the island itself contained a time travel engine at its core, which would have to be different than the light source which was only described as "life, death and rebirth."

The island must be sitting on the edge of a space gravity well. A gravity well is the pull of gravity that a large body in space exerts. The larger the body (the more mass) the more of a gravity well it has. The Sun has a large (or deep) gravity well. Asteroids and small moons have much shallower gravity wells. Anything on a planet or moon is considered to be at the bottom of the gravity well. Entering space from the surface of a planet or moon means climbing out of the gravity well, something that often takes a huge amount of energy. The larger a planet or moon's gravity well is, the more energy it takes to achieve escape velocity and blast a ship off of it.

A black hole is a "gravity well" that is so strong that NOTHING escapes from it, not even light. It sounds like that can't possibly be true, but it is.

The earth's gravitational force keeps us walking on the surface rather than floating into the air. It is also what makes things fall to the earth. Gravitational force on the moon is not as strong as on the earth. Generally speaking, the larger the body, the more gravitational force it exerts.

Gravity is the common resistance against motion. In sports, every athlete is competing against gravity. For example, a baseball player who hits towering home runs is exerting more force on the ball than someone who hits little ground balls. Sports is all about throwing, hitting, running, and moving faster. If someone could figure out a way to reduce their own personal gravity, they would have a distinct advantage. 

In space travel, it is possible to escape the earth's gravitational force and launch a rocket into "outer" space. The amount of force required to escape the gravitational force is called the "escape velocity".

At sea level , sound travels at a speed of 769.5 miles per hour (1238 km/h), depending on other factors such as atmospheric conditions, wind, etc. Modern jets can "outrun" the speed of sound quite easily. But for purposes of the black hole discussion, it is important to understand that the biggest force or resistance to the speed of sound is gravity, just as it is with solid objects.

Similarly, the speed of light is affected by gravity. Light travels at a speed of 186,282.397 miles per second, which is 670,616,629.4 miles per hour, 983,571,056.4 feet per second, roughly one foot per nanosecond! Nothing man-made can outrun the speed of light.

The island appeared to be in constant motion and not fixed to the Earth's core. That is why some fans believed it to be a alien spacecraft disguised as a tropical island. Because of its movement, the time on the island was in flux. Like all time mechanisms, it needs to be regulated like clock gears. A reset every 108 minutes could be that regulator which gave the island some form of space time stability.

But it also appeared that the island's time differential was highly localized. It would be hard to imagine how this localized time field could be monetized by powerful men like Widmore. People still aged on the island so it was not the fountain of youth (the exception was Jacob and Alpert who may have been "special" as in spirits).

Gravity was described as a "weak force" in terms of the vacuum of space itself. But it must be in vast quantities that it can affect so many things such as light and sound waves. Gravity itself could be viewed as its own unique space element which may have properties that we have not yet understood.
It may have the property of building up pressure in resistance to energy forces (like the island's EM field) so that it needs to be "released" at timely intervals (again, another possible purpose of the Hatch). 

Is it possible that the resistance of a gravity well was the trap that kept both the smoke monster and Jacob in prison on the island? If that is the case, and the island survived their final battle, than that same gravity well would have kept them on the island forever.

It would have been nice if the writers would have given a clearer explanation of their view of time and space as it related to the island events.