What would it be like to be caught between worlds?
The world of the living and the world of the dead.
The world of the living and an other world of a distant alien planet.
Both are plausible explanations of the island in LOST. It is true because of the lack of concrete canon to support the sci-fi story lines with actual physics.
Peppered throughout the discussions of the island are scientific concepts like "portals," "worm holes," time travel experimentation, psychological conditioning, and unique electromagnetic properties. But to suspend belief in a science basis for the island, what do we have to consider?
An island that cannot be seen or mapped from the sky is not an island. It is something else.
An island that can move and disappear is not an island. It has to be something else.
But since Eloise Hawking could calculate its apparent location (with some assumptions), the island's movement must follow a pattern. Nature follows patterns. So does the Earth's electromagnetic grid. The island could be moving to intersection points along with Earth's electromagnetic grid. This makes the island a ship and not an island.
Electromagnetism and bending of light are principles in research for stealth technologies. To make things appear invisible, magicians use mirrors and distraction (such as a pretty assistant) to make the illusion complete. Mirrors, distractions and illusions were all story points in LOST.
What is the purpose of an island moving along an electromagnetic grid? It could be "recharging" itself from specific deep core entry points. It may need a certain amount of energy or flow to "contain" its own power system (which malfunctioned several times to create time skips and purple skies).
Some viewers believed the island was a space-time portal. The teleportation of Locke and Ben to Tunisia was proof of it (in a small scale). The capture of Flight 815 from the sky could be another example as well as all the ship wrecks. It could also explain the "immortality" of Jacob since he controlled the island and thus controlled time itself. One could equate Jacob to that of being a Time Lord.
No one has really thought about the island as being a TARDIS like device piloted by aliens. But in a UFO observatory conspiracy theory, an island would be a good cover to house a base to spy on human beings. A remote island would be a great place to bring humans to do experiments on. You don't need to be gray aliens to poke humans; as shape shifting beings you can create yourself in the image of your laboratory animals.
Jacob and the Man in Black did admit that bringing humans to the island was part of their grand game. An experiment on how humans react to the island conditions, with MIB lamenting that humans always screwed up in the end. MIB was so frustrated with it that he wanted to go "home." But Jacob would not let him - - - basically making him/it a prisoner on the island. So MIB used the corrupt humans in order to rebel against Jacob, to seize control of the island ship to leave Earth.
It does sound like a Dr. Who story line: who controls the TARDIS can control the universe. As Widmore desired control of the island, there were others like Ben who tried to protect it from becoming a weapon of power. But Ben was corrupted by that same power when he purged Dharma.
Therefore, we have the literary means of the island being the center piece between two worlds. The debate is what is the other world? Is it the religious connotation of the after life (as adored by the temple and the Egyptian mythology)? Or it is a sci-fi based drama based upon the Faraday notebook and Dharma stations?
In either situation, it puts our castaways not as lost survivors of a transportation disaster, but human guinea pigs in a science fiction fantasy world.
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
BACK IN TIME
New research by quantum physics infers that it may be possible, in theory, to time travel. However, the scientists believe that one could only go back in time.
LOST had a bad mix of time travel events. Did the frozen donkey wheel create the time travel episodes? Or was it the containment field from the Swan station? Or was it all a red herring by the writers?
The island's "rules" lacked clear continuity. In the Star Trek universe, Gene Roddenberry set down a specific set of rules, including science fiction elements, which carried the series through to today. LOST's showrunners did not take the time or have the patience to forge a realistic, compelling and believable sci-fi doctrine.
The weird science is explained by the strange electromagnetics of the island, inferring that those island experiences are in a different sequence in time and space. When Sayid gets the radio working, they hear a radio broadcast from the 1940s. When Sayid, Frank and Desmond left the island, they experienced events in a different sequence. When Desmond survived the Swan implosion, he began seeing future events. When the freighter doctor's corpse washed up on shore, it was out of sequence with the real time on the freighter (where he was still alive).
In the orientation film for the Orchid station, scientists talked about the island allowing DHARMA to conduct experiments to move rabbits ahead in time and in space. When Ben and Locke turned the frozen donkey wheel under the Orchid station, they found themselves 10 months in the future in a desert halfway around the world.
When the survivors left behind after Ben's wheel turning experienced a time travel change, there was a blinding purple flash (similar to when the Hatch imploded). After Locke fixed the wheel, there was one last flash, but this time the flash was bright white, rather than purple. In all instances, the travelers experienced severe head pain, most likely caused by the extremely loud noise occurring during the flashes.
People who weren't affected by the time travel appeared to be unaware of the blinding flash and loud noise. For example, Danielle didn't react to or mention the noise or light before Jin disappeared, and when he reappeared in her future, she thought Jin was sick because he disappeared.) It was the inconsistent treatment of people in the same situation which left the story weak and confused. There was no justification for allowing only certain people on the island to time skip while others did not.
For there to be a rational explanation for the differences in time travel on individuals, one must take into consideration that it may not have been time travel at all. How one experiences the passage of time is through consciousness and memory. If one can take an individual and alter, through mind control or neurologic drugs, their consciousness and memories, one could instill false memories including false time. It get backs to the possibility that much of LOST's story is not based in reality, but in the altered mind, memories or subconscious of the characters.
LOST had a bad mix of time travel events. Did the frozen donkey wheel create the time travel episodes? Or was it the containment field from the Swan station? Or was it all a red herring by the writers?
The island's "rules" lacked clear continuity. In the Star Trek universe, Gene Roddenberry set down a specific set of rules, including science fiction elements, which carried the series through to today. LOST's showrunners did not take the time or have the patience to forge a realistic, compelling and believable sci-fi doctrine.
The weird science is explained by the strange electromagnetics of the island, inferring that those island experiences are in a different sequence in time and space. When Sayid gets the radio working, they hear a radio broadcast from the 1940s. When Sayid, Frank and Desmond left the island, they experienced events in a different sequence. When Desmond survived the Swan implosion, he began seeing future events. When the freighter doctor's corpse washed up on shore, it was out of sequence with the real time on the freighter (where he was still alive).
In the orientation film for the Orchid station, scientists talked about the island allowing DHARMA to conduct experiments to move rabbits ahead in time and in space. When Ben and Locke turned the frozen donkey wheel under the Orchid station, they found themselves 10 months in the future in a desert halfway around the world.
When the survivors left behind after Ben's wheel turning experienced a time travel change, there was a blinding purple flash (similar to when the Hatch imploded). After Locke fixed the wheel, there was one last flash, but this time the flash was bright white, rather than purple. In all instances, the travelers experienced severe head pain, most likely caused by the extremely loud noise occurring during the flashes.
People who weren't affected by the time travel appeared to be unaware of the blinding flash and loud noise. For example, Danielle didn't react to or mention the noise or light before Jin disappeared, and when he reappeared in her future, she thought Jin was sick because he disappeared.) It was the inconsistent treatment of people in the same situation which left the story weak and confused. There was no justification for allowing only certain people on the island to time skip while others did not.
For there to be a rational explanation for the differences in time travel on individuals, one must take into consideration that it may not have been time travel at all. How one experiences the passage of time is through consciousness and memory. If one can take an individual and alter, through mind control or neurologic drugs, their consciousness and memories, one could instill false memories including false time. It get backs to the possibility that much of LOST's story is not based in reality, but in the altered mind, memories or subconscious of the characters.
Monday, September 19, 2016
TIME TRAVEL THEORY
According to Stephen Hawking, there are plausible explanations for no paradox in time travel:
“A possible way to reconcile time travel, with the fact that we don't seem to have had any visitors from the future, would be to say that it can occur only in the future. In this view, one would say space-time in our past was fixed, because we have observed it, and seen that it is not warped enough, to allow travel into the past.”Carl Sagan made a similar argument during a NOVA interview in the 1990s: “Maybe backward time travel is possible, but only up to the moment that time travel is invented. We haven't invented it yet, so they can't come to us. They can come to as far back as whatever it would be, say A.D. 2300, but not further back in time.”
So, time travel may indeed be possible, but you can’t go back any further than the point at which the time machine was first invented in the space-time line.
This line of reasoning would mean that there would be little chance of a time traveling paradox - - - i.e. going back in time to kill Hitler before World War II. But it also stops future paradoxes since the time traveler would not not what the future holds when he arrives in the future so he cannot change it. But perhaps, his mere presence in the future would cause changes that could alter the future - - - but then, is his arrival already part of that future time line?
The Hawking-Sagan reasoning was not applied in LOST. The characters quickly time skipped to the past (1970s) and to the future-present. There was no logical or systemic way the island took only a few characters along for the time ride, while leaving others in different time periods in the same place. In LOST's time travel loops, it is more likely that there were not truly time-space jumps but hallucinations, simulations, vivid dreams or laboratory rat experiments to challenge and change the main characters behaviors.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
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.
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.
Friday, February 13, 2015
THE UNLUCKY ANSWER
As today is Friday, the 13th, a superstitious day of bad luck, we focus on the one character who could have answered all the LOST questions, Daniel Faraday.
Poor Daniel. He was doomed from the start.
His back story was as hazy as his science.
Daniel was born on the mainland (as there is a birth certificate for him) and was the son of Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore, although he did not know the identity of his father (that was left blank on the birth certificate). This is the first unsolved mystery of this character: who was Daniel's real father?
We know that young Eloise and Widmore were co-leaders of a small Others fraction on the Island. Widmore wanted control of "his" island against any outsider, and Eloise seemed to be more focused on survival. How they both got to the island was unknown. But it seems they were both quite protective of it.
During their early adulthood, the time traveling Daniel appears on the island. Eloise shoots and kills "her son" then realizes her mistake. This sets off one of the most important background characters into action.
We know that both Eloise and Widmore left the island before the Purge. Widmore was banished by Ben because Widmore "violated the rules" by having a child (Penny) with an off-islander. Eloise's departure was not told. (She could have been part of the evacuation, or she may have left after killing her son in the time travel arc.)
It would seem that Eloise's sole goal in the series was to protect Daniel. After Eloise and Widmore's relationship soured, Eloise also changed Daniel's last name to Faraday so Charles could not find him. But we know how powerful Widmore was; he knew and found Daniel.
One could speculate that the falling out between Eloise and Widmore was about Daniel and his special abilities. Daniel had "time traveled" to the island. Widmore wanted to get back to the island and seize it as his own. What better means to do so than "time travel." Likewise, Eloise would want to save the time traveling Daniel from her own actions of killing him. As a result, Eloise may have needed to find a man who was a scientific genius. (Clue to last name: Stephen Hawking.)
Eloise needed to unlock the elements of space-time in order to correct Daniel's destiny. So she forced Daniel to give up music to study extreme theoretical science. So Daniel studied at Oxford, earning his doctorate at the youngest age on record. At that time, his girlfriend Teresa Spencer, was deemed to be a distraction. Soon after, Daniel started unauthorized experiments (funded by Widmore) involving time travel. He created a machine in 1996 that allowed a living creature's consciousness to travel through time. He tested it on a lab rat he named Eloise, which signifies an open hostility toward his mother and her constant pressure on him to succeed in this science.
During that same year, Daniel was visited by a stranger named Desmond Hume. Desmond claimed to know about the machine, Daniel initially believed that a colleague was playing a practical joke on him, but when Desmond mentioned "Eloise," Daniel's lab rat, he believed Desmond. In his lab, Daniel tested "the Numbers" Desmond supplied to him. He used the machine on Eloise, enabling her to unerringly complete a maze that she would not be taught how to run for another hour. Daniel's blackboard revealed his interest in the Kerr metric as part of his theory of time-transported consciousness. According to Daniel's theory, a being that undergoes time-transported consciousness must identify a "constant," something existing in both periods of time travel that can serve as an anchor for the being's consciousness; failure to find a constant results in instability of consciousness, and the resulting stress can lead to brain aneurysm and eventual death.
Daniel's success led him to ramp up his experiments. The experiment apparently resulted in Theresa becoming permanently mentally 'unstuck' in time, with her condition deteriorating to the point that she became permanently bedridden, in a coma-like state as a result of his experiments. (Widmore funded her care for her parents silence.) Soon after this accident, Daniel went to America. Daniel began to study at DHARMA. It seemed that Daniel started to experiment on himself, which wrecked his ability to connect with his own memory. He constantly wrote notes in his leather journal to remember.
But while in the United States, Daniel's mental state deteriorated to the point in 2004 where he is under the care of a woman (caretaker or some initially assumed a girlfriend or wife). When the news of Flight 815's crash, with film footage of the wreckage shown on the television, Daniel had a mental breakdown which he could not explain. When Widmore arrived, he told him that the wreckage was a fake. He told Daniel that the real Flight 815 had crashed on a "miraculous island," and offered him the chance to go there, promising that it would "cure" him. Several days later, Daniel was playing piano at his home, trying to remember the Chopin piece he was playing when he was ten, when he was visited by his mother. She persuaded him to accept Widmore's offer and go to the Island, assuring him that she would be proud of him if he did so. Daniel agreed to accept the offer.
Daniel brought several critical (we thought) elements to the LOST mythology. First, he brought with him science explanations for the island's mysteries. Second, he brought with him a window to the people pulling the strings behind the curtain (Eloise and Widmore, shadow villains). Third, he brought in intellectually naive character in the mix of amateur action heroes.
But Daniel's story is really messed up.
First, there are the paradoxes that cannot be put in their places. Young Eloise "kills" her adult yet unborn son on the island. This is a classic time travel problem that should have had radical results. Since Eloise has a son in the future, but kills him in the past, why would she "re-live" this pain by actually conceiving him in the future? Some could argue that an adult traveling back into time to meet their death is not a conventional paradox since Daniel was destined to die "someday," and this was the means of his own demise. But a secondary issue is that if Eloise knew Daniel was going to die on the island, why did she do everything in power after killing him to get him to study time travel and go on the trip to the island?
It would seem that Eloise "needed" Daniel to become a brilliant scientist in order to kill him on the island so her own fantasy sideways world dream family situation would come true. In Daniel's death on the island, Eloise could lead a normal, but rich life in the after life. It sounds insane, but that seems to be the whole motivation for the Eloise manipulation of both Daniel and Widmore.
So Daniel had a bounty on his head before he was even born. He was never going to have a real, normal, human life.
Second, if Daniel's theory of mental consciousness time travel is to be believed, was his research adopted by DHARMA to create the full transformation of physical time travel as demonstrated by the turning of the frozen donkey wheel? When Ben turned it, the island began "time skipping" but only with a few individuals. The idea of someone having a "constant" in real and skip times seems to be moot because people have connections in those worlds (i.e. parents, close friends, spouses, children, etc.). If the salvation key is consciously putting a mental image of a person in both time periods in your mind before you time jump, then that seems superficially a magic chant or spell and not science. (The ancient Egyptians Book of the Dead contained various chants and spells to help souls travel through the dangers of the underworld; perhaps Daniel's theory is like these spells.)
If Daniel was already mentally time tripping in the U.S., then why did he need to go to the island? The only explanation was that he needed to "die" on the island in order for his consciousness (some would call it his soul) to reach Eloise in the after life, so she could repress his memories and not "move on" through the next level of existence. This would presuppose that the island is actually an inter-dimensional gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead. For some unknown reason, people dying on the island have their memories repressed when their souls reach the after life. It is sort of a dream state in the sideways world where people, like in dreams, try to subconsciously work out real world problems through various fantasies.
If the island allowed full body and mind time travel, then there should be no "mental" only time travel side effects, such as the nose bleeds and death that happened to Charlotte. Daniel was nose bleeding before he was shot, so he was going to also die even though his "constant," Desmond, was on the island and in his original time period. So, since there are two sets of rules at play in one time travel sequence, no clear conclusion could be made on what is truly happening on the island. If Daniel's theory is the control, then everyone on the island was time tripping, in a dream like state, in a forehell to the sideways world. If DHARMA and the island's FDW full time travel machine was the control, then only when you met yourself in both time frames could you be paradoxically removed from existence. But that did not happen to Charlotte or Daniel. In face, some time trippers were reincarnated.
So it gets back to the big mystery of why, throughout all the trauma and manipulation of Daniel's life, did Eloise want, need, desire or demand Daniel to be on the freighter, come ashore, and be killed by her younger self? The only viable answer was that guilt was making Eloise dream up these actions.
For the symbolism of a young woman killing her "adult" child could represent a psychological trauma of Eloise's young life, such as an abortion. If she aborted "Daniel" or lost him during pregnancy on the island, then the series could evolve around a troubled young woman's lost mental state of delusions and fantasies of having the perfect life with her dead fetus. Eloise could have been haunted by her actions so that she could have been institutionalized as a mental patient. As creepy as that may seem, it allows for the fact that science, sci-fi and any other rational explanations for series events be immaterial and irrelevant. The sole factor was keeping her dead child from realizing that his own mother killed him.
His back story was as hazy as his science.
Daniel was born on the mainland (as there is a birth certificate for him) and was the son of Eloise Hawking and Charles Widmore, although he did not know the identity of his father (that was left blank on the birth certificate). This is the first unsolved mystery of this character: who was Daniel's real father?
We know that young Eloise and Widmore were co-leaders of a small Others fraction on the Island. Widmore wanted control of "his" island against any outsider, and Eloise seemed to be more focused on survival. How they both got to the island was unknown. But it seems they were both quite protective of it.
During their early adulthood, the time traveling Daniel appears on the island. Eloise shoots and kills "her son" then realizes her mistake. This sets off one of the most important background characters into action.
We know that both Eloise and Widmore left the island before the Purge. Widmore was banished by Ben because Widmore "violated the rules" by having a child (Penny) with an off-islander. Eloise's departure was not told. (She could have been part of the evacuation, or she may have left after killing her son in the time travel arc.)
It would seem that Eloise's sole goal in the series was to protect Daniel. After Eloise and Widmore's relationship soured, Eloise also changed Daniel's last name to Faraday so Charles could not find him. But we know how powerful Widmore was; he knew and found Daniel.
One could speculate that the falling out between Eloise and Widmore was about Daniel and his special abilities. Daniel had "time traveled" to the island. Widmore wanted to get back to the island and seize it as his own. What better means to do so than "time travel." Likewise, Eloise would want to save the time traveling Daniel from her own actions of killing him. As a result, Eloise may have needed to find a man who was a scientific genius. (Clue to last name: Stephen Hawking.)
Eloise needed to unlock the elements of space-time in order to correct Daniel's destiny. So she forced Daniel to give up music to study extreme theoretical science. So Daniel studied at Oxford, earning his doctorate at the youngest age on record. At that time, his girlfriend Teresa Spencer, was deemed to be a distraction. Soon after, Daniel started unauthorized experiments (funded by Widmore) involving time travel. He created a machine in 1996 that allowed a living creature's consciousness to travel through time. He tested it on a lab rat he named Eloise, which signifies an open hostility toward his mother and her constant pressure on him to succeed in this science.
During that same year, Daniel was visited by a stranger named Desmond Hume. Desmond claimed to know about the machine, Daniel initially believed that a colleague was playing a practical joke on him, but when Desmond mentioned "Eloise," Daniel's lab rat, he believed Desmond. In his lab, Daniel tested "the Numbers" Desmond supplied to him. He used the machine on Eloise, enabling her to unerringly complete a maze that she would not be taught how to run for another hour. Daniel's blackboard revealed his interest in the Kerr metric as part of his theory of time-transported consciousness. According to Daniel's theory, a being that undergoes time-transported consciousness must identify a "constant," something existing in both periods of time travel that can serve as an anchor for the being's consciousness; failure to find a constant results in instability of consciousness, and the resulting stress can lead to brain aneurysm and eventual death.
Daniel's success led him to ramp up his experiments. The experiment apparently resulted in Theresa becoming permanently mentally 'unstuck' in time, with her condition deteriorating to the point that she became permanently bedridden, in a coma-like state as a result of his experiments. (Widmore funded her care for her parents silence.) Soon after this accident, Daniel went to America. Daniel began to study at DHARMA. It seemed that Daniel started to experiment on himself, which wrecked his ability to connect with his own memory. He constantly wrote notes in his leather journal to remember.
But while in the United States, Daniel's mental state deteriorated to the point in 2004 where he is under the care of a woman (caretaker or some initially assumed a girlfriend or wife). When the news of Flight 815's crash, with film footage of the wreckage shown on the television, Daniel had a mental breakdown which he could not explain. When Widmore arrived, he told him that the wreckage was a fake. He told Daniel that the real Flight 815 had crashed on a "miraculous island," and offered him the chance to go there, promising that it would "cure" him. Several days later, Daniel was playing piano at his home, trying to remember the Chopin piece he was playing when he was ten, when he was visited by his mother. She persuaded him to accept Widmore's offer and go to the Island, assuring him that she would be proud of him if he did so. Daniel agreed to accept the offer.
Daniel brought several critical (we thought) elements to the LOST mythology. First, he brought with him science explanations for the island's mysteries. Second, he brought with him a window to the people pulling the strings behind the curtain (Eloise and Widmore, shadow villains). Third, he brought in intellectually naive character in the mix of amateur action heroes.
But Daniel's story is really messed up.
First, there are the paradoxes that cannot be put in their places. Young Eloise "kills" her adult yet unborn son on the island. This is a classic time travel problem that should have had radical results. Since Eloise has a son in the future, but kills him in the past, why would she "re-live" this pain by actually conceiving him in the future? Some could argue that an adult traveling back into time to meet their death is not a conventional paradox since Daniel was destined to die "someday," and this was the means of his own demise. But a secondary issue is that if Eloise knew Daniel was going to die on the island, why did she do everything in power after killing him to get him to study time travel and go on the trip to the island?
It would seem that Eloise "needed" Daniel to become a brilliant scientist in order to kill him on the island so her own fantasy sideways world dream family situation would come true. In Daniel's death on the island, Eloise could lead a normal, but rich life in the after life. It sounds insane, but that seems to be the whole motivation for the Eloise manipulation of both Daniel and Widmore.
So Daniel had a bounty on his head before he was even born. He was never going to have a real, normal, human life.
Second, if Daniel's theory of mental consciousness time travel is to be believed, was his research adopted by DHARMA to create the full transformation of physical time travel as demonstrated by the turning of the frozen donkey wheel? When Ben turned it, the island began "time skipping" but only with a few individuals. The idea of someone having a "constant" in real and skip times seems to be moot because people have connections in those worlds (i.e. parents, close friends, spouses, children, etc.). If the salvation key is consciously putting a mental image of a person in both time periods in your mind before you time jump, then that seems superficially a magic chant or spell and not science. (The ancient Egyptians Book of the Dead contained various chants and spells to help souls travel through the dangers of the underworld; perhaps Daniel's theory is like these spells.)
If Daniel was already mentally time tripping in the U.S., then why did he need to go to the island? The only explanation was that he needed to "die" on the island in order for his consciousness (some would call it his soul) to reach Eloise in the after life, so she could repress his memories and not "move on" through the next level of existence. This would presuppose that the island is actually an inter-dimensional gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead. For some unknown reason, people dying on the island have their memories repressed when their souls reach the after life. It is sort of a dream state in the sideways world where people, like in dreams, try to subconsciously work out real world problems through various fantasies.
If the island allowed full body and mind time travel, then there should be no "mental" only time travel side effects, such as the nose bleeds and death that happened to Charlotte. Daniel was nose bleeding before he was shot, so he was going to also die even though his "constant," Desmond, was on the island and in his original time period. So, since there are two sets of rules at play in one time travel sequence, no clear conclusion could be made on what is truly happening on the island. If Daniel's theory is the control, then everyone on the island was time tripping, in a dream like state, in a forehell to the sideways world. If DHARMA and the island's FDW full time travel machine was the control, then only when you met yourself in both time frames could you be paradoxically removed from existence. But that did not happen to Charlotte or Daniel. In face, some time trippers were reincarnated.
So it gets back to the big mystery of why, throughout all the trauma and manipulation of Daniel's life, did Eloise want, need, desire or demand Daniel to be on the freighter, come ashore, and be killed by her younger self? The only viable answer was that guilt was making Eloise dream up these actions.
For the symbolism of a young woman killing her "adult" child could represent a psychological trauma of Eloise's young life, such as an abortion. If she aborted "Daniel" or lost him during pregnancy on the island, then the series could evolve around a troubled young woman's lost mental state of delusions and fantasies of having the perfect life with her dead fetus. Eloise could have been haunted by her actions so that she could have been institutionalized as a mental patient. As creepy as that may seem, it allows for the fact that science, sci-fi and any other rational explanations for series events be immaterial and irrelevant. The sole factor was keeping her dead child from realizing that his own mother killed him.
Friday, December 12, 2014
THE FUTURE
It is a rare opportunity to see one's future and not act on it in the present.
In LOST, many of the main characters had a unique opportunity during the time flashes. When the crew was trapped in 1977 Dharmaville, they knew what their futures held for them . . . nothing really good on the island. Only one person seized the opportunity based on his future: Sawyer.
Sawyer took advantage of his future knowledge (being a prisoner of Ben's group) to leverage a position of power within the group (since he did not know whether he would ever return to his real time). He forged his position with his relationship with Juliet, which was non-existent in the real island time line. In fact, Juliet is the exact opposite of a person Sawyer would normally have gone after.
One suspects that this 30 year diversion was so strong a personal bond that Sawyer kept it in his heart until he died (and was reunited with Juliet in the sideways world). But if the characters were bouncing back and forth between time periods, both in the past and future, could Sawyer have actually known about Juliet's fate with the Incident/Jughead? "It worked," she said during the EM implosion - - - was that the final bond to her soulmate, James?
But then, it is fairly sad that Sawyer left the island and presumably lived a long life without Juliet AND a long life without another true companion. Sawyer would have been the type of man who needed company - - - both physical and mental challenges. (Which is why Kate, also a survivor, would have been his better match after leaving the island for the final time.)
It could be argued that Sayid was the one character who understood best what the flash back in time meant to changing the future. It was Sayid who met Young Ben before he turned into the monster dictator. So Sayid took it upon himself to shoot Ben in the chest, presumably killing him. By killing Ben, Sayid thought that the terrorism of the real island time would be extinguished . . . but in all time travel lore, altering the past could have great repercussions on the future. For example, Young Ben was still naive child. But he may have found his true love in Annie or another girl, made childhood island friends, or even left the island for college and a more normal life. He may not have become the Ben who wanted to control the island.
It is more likely that Sayid's gunshot of Ben altered the course of history to actually create Evil Ben. Since the dying child was taken to the Temple by Alpert, who said he would be altered forever by the spring (as we saw in Sayid himself, an evil reincarnation). Sayid's actions in the past may have actually doomed Ben to the island maniac future, including the mass murder of the Dharma group.
In LOST, many of the main characters had a unique opportunity during the time flashes. When the crew was trapped in 1977 Dharmaville, they knew what their futures held for them . . . nothing really good on the island. Only one person seized the opportunity based on his future: Sawyer.
Sawyer took advantage of his future knowledge (being a prisoner of Ben's group) to leverage a position of power within the group (since he did not know whether he would ever return to his real time). He forged his position with his relationship with Juliet, which was non-existent in the real island time line. In fact, Juliet is the exact opposite of a person Sawyer would normally have gone after.
One suspects that this 30 year diversion was so strong a personal bond that Sawyer kept it in his heart until he died (and was reunited with Juliet in the sideways world). But if the characters were bouncing back and forth between time periods, both in the past and future, could Sawyer have actually known about Juliet's fate with the Incident/Jughead? "It worked," she said during the EM implosion - - - was that the final bond to her soulmate, James?
But then, it is fairly sad that Sawyer left the island and presumably lived a long life without Juliet AND a long life without another true companion. Sawyer would have been the type of man who needed company - - - both physical and mental challenges. (Which is why Kate, also a survivor, would have been his better match after leaving the island for the final time.)
It could be argued that Sayid was the one character who understood best what the flash back in time meant to changing the future. It was Sayid who met Young Ben before he turned into the monster dictator. So Sayid took it upon himself to shoot Ben in the chest, presumably killing him. By killing Ben, Sayid thought that the terrorism of the real island time would be extinguished . . . but in all time travel lore, altering the past could have great repercussions on the future. For example, Young Ben was still naive child. But he may have found his true love in Annie or another girl, made childhood island friends, or even left the island for college and a more normal life. He may not have become the Ben who wanted to control the island.
It is more likely that Sayid's gunshot of Ben altered the course of history to actually create Evil Ben. Since the dying child was taken to the Temple by Alpert, who said he would be altered forever by the spring (as we saw in Sayid himself, an evil reincarnation). Sayid's actions in the past may have actually doomed Ben to the island maniac future, including the mass murder of the Dharma group.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
THE STORY OF A STORY
There is a story floating about the internet about an anonymous man who claims that in 2009, he traveled to a parallel universe. It has all the seemingly vivid details of an actual occurrence, but the hook is what puts people into the strange, whacko camp.
The man was driving with his through rural California. The dog gets restless so he stops the car in a remote area. The dog does it's business, but then is distracted by a rabbit and runs off. The man chases his dog, but as he is running he steps into a hole, falls and becomes unconscious.
He wakes up inside a small trailer-like home. There is a greasy haired man who tells him that he is 20 feet away from where he fell. But the man says that cannot be possible since there was no house where he fell. The stranger then tells him he found the unconscious guy baking in the desert sun , so brought him back to his home - - - in a parallel universe.
Inside the house, the stranger tells the man that in his world, there is expensive technology that allows people to travel between the infinite parallel universes. It was developed in his world in the 1950s as part of a space exploration project. During this discussion, the stranger says that there are multiple Earths each with its own path. As he wanders to the living room, he sees a music system with cassette tapes. The stranger and the man discuss music briefly, and the stranger tells him about the "new" Beatles album called Everyday Chemistry. The man says in his world the Beatles broke up, and two are dead. The stranger says in his world, the Beatles never broke up. The man could not believe it.
The stranger told him that the machine that allows him and others to travel between worlds is dangerous. Many people teleport to places where there is an ocean (and drown), or there is no ground (and fall from space and die). Travelers are not allowed to take things to their destination or bring things back because that would violate the rules for dimension travel (and endanger one's life).
The stranger goes to answer the doorbell, and the man decides to take a cassette tape for this Beatles album. He then leaves back through the Parallel Machine which he describes as feeling wet but without an liquid. When the man returns to his world, he has a copy of the Beatles tape in his pocket. He listens to it and believes that it is indeed the Beatles.
Now many people believe that it is a hoax, an elaborate story, or a fantasy induced by secondary means. Whatever the status, it does raise as possible ode to the LOST mythology.
In the Dharma camp, we first thought it odd that the equipment, including stereos, were not up to date but really older technology from the 1970s. This sort of matches the man's desert story where a world with fantastic technology of portals to other Earth dimensions would create lower levels of technology such as cassette tapes as being the current music standard.
In LOST, there is a reference to other "Earth gates" in the hieroglyphs in the FDW chamber. So it is possible that turning the wheel was really a functioning parallel dimension transportation machine. So when the island "disappeared" it was not a real disappearance but removal to another dimension. As the sideways world was also a different dimension but with the same characters and similar lifestyles, the theory that LOST was not a show about time travel but parallel universes does have some plot event support.
The idea that one earth dimension is in the Pacific Ocean, but the machine drops a user into the African desert is similar to the man's story. The dimensions can have the same components but at the same time be completely different. If you think every time there was an "incident" with the FDW, the life force energy bursts, then the LOST story is not one dimension or even two: every jump was another card in the deck. So we really don't know where the characters began or where they ended up.
Perhaps the resolution is when the characters jump from one dimension and find themselves in another. The merger of experiences actually kills them. Then in death, with the merged memories, they can move on to another plane of existence.
The man was driving with his through rural California. The dog gets restless so he stops the car in a remote area. The dog does it's business, but then is distracted by a rabbit and runs off. The man chases his dog, but as he is running he steps into a hole, falls and becomes unconscious.
He wakes up inside a small trailer-like home. There is a greasy haired man who tells him that he is 20 feet away from where he fell. But the man says that cannot be possible since there was no house where he fell. The stranger then tells him he found the unconscious guy baking in the desert sun , so brought him back to his home - - - in a parallel universe.
Inside the house, the stranger tells the man that in his world, there is expensive technology that allows people to travel between the infinite parallel universes. It was developed in his world in the 1950s as part of a space exploration project. During this discussion, the stranger says that there are multiple Earths each with its own path. As he wanders to the living room, he sees a music system with cassette tapes. The stranger and the man discuss music briefly, and the stranger tells him about the "new" Beatles album called Everyday Chemistry. The man says in his world the Beatles broke up, and two are dead. The stranger says in his world, the Beatles never broke up. The man could not believe it.
The stranger told him that the machine that allows him and others to travel between worlds is dangerous. Many people teleport to places where there is an ocean (and drown), or there is no ground (and fall from space and die). Travelers are not allowed to take things to their destination or bring things back because that would violate the rules for dimension travel (and endanger one's life).
The stranger goes to answer the doorbell, and the man decides to take a cassette tape for this Beatles album. He then leaves back through the Parallel Machine which he describes as feeling wet but without an liquid. When the man returns to his world, he has a copy of the Beatles tape in his pocket. He listens to it and believes that it is indeed the Beatles.
Now many people believe that it is a hoax, an elaborate story, or a fantasy induced by secondary means. Whatever the status, it does raise as possible ode to the LOST mythology.
In the Dharma camp, we first thought it odd that the equipment, including stereos, were not up to date but really older technology from the 1970s. This sort of matches the man's desert story where a world with fantastic technology of portals to other Earth dimensions would create lower levels of technology such as cassette tapes as being the current music standard.
In LOST, there is a reference to other "Earth gates" in the hieroglyphs in the FDW chamber. So it is possible that turning the wheel was really a functioning parallel dimension transportation machine. So when the island "disappeared" it was not a real disappearance but removal to another dimension. As the sideways world was also a different dimension but with the same characters and similar lifestyles, the theory that LOST was not a show about time travel but parallel universes does have some plot event support.
The idea that one earth dimension is in the Pacific Ocean, but the machine drops a user into the African desert is similar to the man's story. The dimensions can have the same components but at the same time be completely different. If you think every time there was an "incident" with the FDW, the life force energy bursts, then the LOST story is not one dimension or even two: every jump was another card in the deck. So we really don't know where the characters began or where they ended up.
Perhaps the resolution is when the characters jump from one dimension and find themselves in another. The merger of experiences actually kills them. Then in death, with the merged memories, they can move on to another plane of existence.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
CRACKING THE THOUGHT CODE
Researchers have made interesting inroads into the human brain thought process.
The BBC reported that brain neurons function by sending bursts of electric pulses to parts of the brain, which in turn form the basis of thoughts and memories. Scientists have begun to use these pulse patterns to make algorithm or formulas to determine how the brain functions.
They have used probed rats to run mazes to record the thought patterns of the subjects.
While the rat runs the maze researchers record where it is, and simultaneously how the cells in the hippocampus are firing. The cell firing patterns are thrown into a mathematical algorithm which finds the pattern that best matches each bit of the maze. The language of the cells is no less complex, but now science believes it has a Rosetta Stone against which scientists can decode the thought process. Researchers then test the algorithm by feeding the freshly recorded patterns back into the subject, to see if it correctly predicts where the rat was at the point that pattern was recorded.
It doesn’t allow a complete code crack, because scientists still don't know all the rules, and it can’t help them read the patterns which aren't from this bit of the brain or which aren't about maze running, but it is still a powerful tool. For instance, using this technique, the research team was able to show that the specific sequence of cell firing repeated in the brain of the rat when it slept after running the maze (and, as a crucial comparison, not in the sleep it had enjoyed before it had run the maze).
Fascinatingly, the sequence repeated faster during sleep – around 20 times faster. This meant that the rat could run the maze in their sleeping minds in a fraction of the time it took them in real life. This could be related to the mnemonic function of sleep; by replaying the memory, it might have helped the rat to consolidate its learning. And the fact that the replay was accelerated might give researchers a glimpse of the activity that lies behind sudden insights, or experiences where our life “flashes before our eyes”; when not restrained, our thoughts really can retrace familiar paths in “fast forward”.
This new scientific research plays very well in the LOST universe.
Look at the key reference points: flashes before our eyes, flash forwards, mazes, sleep and memory. These were all critical components in the story lines. So much so that it brings us to a new theory based on this science.
When one is asleep, one can have vivid dreams. Dreams so vivid that they seem absolutely real. And once one wakes up, these vivid dreams seem like actual memories.
When one is in a dream state, the mind processes information 20 times faster than in one's waking state. This tends to give dreamers the impression that their dreams may last for hours, but in reality the REM sleep was only for minutes. This is a illusion of time displacement in one's mind.
What Daniel's Oxford experiment was similar to was the thought researchers experiment about a lab rat learning a maze. In Daniel's case, learning it before it ran it. But in a certain way, Daniel "programmed" his rat, Eloise, to run the maze by imputing the maze algorithm while at the subject was asleep. Eloise "learned" the maze in a dream state so vivid that she thought it was a real memory when she was put at the starting gate.
And this segment of the story line, glossed over by many viewers, is probably the key to unraveling a better explanation for the series sci-fi foundation. For if one takes the confusing "time travel" and "time skip" elements of the story lines and realize that they are merely metaphors for "thought coding" dreams, then LOST takes a whole different road to understanding.
In all the time travel segments, if one substitutes the fact that no real time travel happened - - - that it was all thought code imparted into a character's mind, then things start to make better sense.
Dharma was a research group looking into various components of mental applications. Room 23 was clearly a mind control chamber. But there is other evidence of mind and thought control. If one imparts new memories into polar bears that they are actually tropical animals, the bears would be more quickly adapt to their new environment. If Dharma found the way to implant new memories into human beings, then that control would be extremely important - - - and possibly a military weapon.
So the island vanishing and time skipping to the 1970s never really happened; the characters merely thought it did because their brains were re-wired with those adventures. The main characters were actually lab rats in some grand experiment on human beings. Perhaps Jacob was not the immortal demigod, but the guardian of the process in which he fed various events into his subjects to determine whether he could actually change a person's free will, good or evil personality or behavior patterns. Or whether those long term personality traits would "corrupt" the new mental programming which would lead to failure (or death). Instead of remembering the actual programmed events, the character's minds could short circuit and take those memories and turn them into twisted nightmares by merging with older memories.
It also gets back to the unexplained big clue that the characters had to "awaken" in order to move on or be free. Awaken from what? The dream and thought experiments?
What better way to treat a mental health patient than creating a new, better personality for him or her. For example, Hurley was destined to be a lonely, semi-skilled fast food worker filled with anxiety, self-worth issues and manic depression. But if he was re-programmed to be a lottery winner, a person with new found confidence, a business owner success, could that really change his life? If not, would the programmers ramp up the thought conversion process to shock his mind with an extreme plane crash island survival story in order to "cure" Hurley's mental state?
It is a good theory but not a complete one because the sideways world makes a mess of most theories. Since the sideways world is death, plain and simple, then which memories are actually the "true" ones? One could say the reason the characters met in the church was that there one great shared experience that bonded them together was the collective thought control experiments - - - which led to actual deaths. But those strong memories were so vivid and clear, that it was those imprints on the characters' souls that matter most in the after life.
Trouble real characters + failed thought control experiments with fake island events = death = sideways world reunion of souls bonded together by the memories from their experiments.
The BBC reported that brain neurons function by sending bursts of electric pulses to parts of the brain, which in turn form the basis of thoughts and memories. Scientists have begun to use these pulse patterns to make algorithm or formulas to determine how the brain functions.
They have used probed rats to run mazes to record the thought patterns of the subjects.
While the rat runs the maze researchers record where it is, and simultaneously how the cells in the hippocampus are firing. The cell firing patterns are thrown into a mathematical algorithm which finds the pattern that best matches each bit of the maze. The language of the cells is no less complex, but now science believes it has a Rosetta Stone against which scientists can decode the thought process. Researchers then test the algorithm by feeding the freshly recorded patterns back into the subject, to see if it correctly predicts where the rat was at the point that pattern was recorded.
It doesn’t allow a complete code crack, because scientists still don't know all the rules, and it can’t help them read the patterns which aren't from this bit of the brain or which aren't about maze running, but it is still a powerful tool. For instance, using this technique, the research team was able to show that the specific sequence of cell firing repeated in the brain of the rat when it slept after running the maze (and, as a crucial comparison, not in the sleep it had enjoyed before it had run the maze).
Fascinatingly, the sequence repeated faster during sleep – around 20 times faster. This meant that the rat could run the maze in their sleeping minds in a fraction of the time it took them in real life. This could be related to the mnemonic function of sleep; by replaying the memory, it might have helped the rat to consolidate its learning. And the fact that the replay was accelerated might give researchers a glimpse of the activity that lies behind sudden insights, or experiences where our life “flashes before our eyes”; when not restrained, our thoughts really can retrace familiar paths in “fast forward”.
This new scientific research plays very well in the LOST universe.
Look at the key reference points: flashes before our eyes, flash forwards, mazes, sleep and memory. These were all critical components in the story lines. So much so that it brings us to a new theory based on this science.
When one is asleep, one can have vivid dreams. Dreams so vivid that they seem absolutely real. And once one wakes up, these vivid dreams seem like actual memories.
When one is in a dream state, the mind processes information 20 times faster than in one's waking state. This tends to give dreamers the impression that their dreams may last for hours, but in reality the REM sleep was only for minutes. This is a illusion of time displacement in one's mind.
What Daniel's Oxford experiment was similar to was the thought researchers experiment about a lab rat learning a maze. In Daniel's case, learning it before it ran it. But in a certain way, Daniel "programmed" his rat, Eloise, to run the maze by imputing the maze algorithm while at the subject was asleep. Eloise "learned" the maze in a dream state so vivid that she thought it was a real memory when she was put at the starting gate.
And this segment of the story line, glossed over by many viewers, is probably the key to unraveling a better explanation for the series sci-fi foundation. For if one takes the confusing "time travel" and "time skip" elements of the story lines and realize that they are merely metaphors for "thought coding" dreams, then LOST takes a whole different road to understanding.
In all the time travel segments, if one substitutes the fact that no real time travel happened - - - that it was all thought code imparted into a character's mind, then things start to make better sense.
Dharma was a research group looking into various components of mental applications. Room 23 was clearly a mind control chamber. But there is other evidence of mind and thought control. If one imparts new memories into polar bears that they are actually tropical animals, the bears would be more quickly adapt to their new environment. If Dharma found the way to implant new memories into human beings, then that control would be extremely important - - - and possibly a military weapon.
So the island vanishing and time skipping to the 1970s never really happened; the characters merely thought it did because their brains were re-wired with those adventures. The main characters were actually lab rats in some grand experiment on human beings. Perhaps Jacob was not the immortal demigod, but the guardian of the process in which he fed various events into his subjects to determine whether he could actually change a person's free will, good or evil personality or behavior patterns. Or whether those long term personality traits would "corrupt" the new mental programming which would lead to failure (or death). Instead of remembering the actual programmed events, the character's minds could short circuit and take those memories and turn them into twisted nightmares by merging with older memories.
It also gets back to the unexplained big clue that the characters had to "awaken" in order to move on or be free. Awaken from what? The dream and thought experiments?
What better way to treat a mental health patient than creating a new, better personality for him or her. For example, Hurley was destined to be a lonely, semi-skilled fast food worker filled with anxiety, self-worth issues and manic depression. But if he was re-programmed to be a lottery winner, a person with new found confidence, a business owner success, could that really change his life? If not, would the programmers ramp up the thought conversion process to shock his mind with an extreme plane crash island survival story in order to "cure" Hurley's mental state?
It is a good theory but not a complete one because the sideways world makes a mess of most theories. Since the sideways world is death, plain and simple, then which memories are actually the "true" ones? One could say the reason the characters met in the church was that there one great shared experience that bonded them together was the collective thought control experiments - - - which led to actual deaths. But those strong memories were so vivid and clear, that it was those imprints on the characters' souls that matter most in the after life.
Trouble real characters + failed thought control experiments with fake island events = death = sideways world reunion of souls bonded together by the memories from their experiments.
Friday, August 8, 2014
TIME SHIFTS
On another tangent on the theme of Time, if one overlays the pivot points of the series time lines around the Flight 815 trip, this comes into focus:
One thing you notice immediately is that the sideways time line starts at two different points on the main island story time line. The sideways beginning point is the 2004 safe landing at LAX, but in the island time line the arrival is 7 days before the island time line ends in 2007, more than three years later in that relative time frame. Since island time memories were the key to the characters revelations in the sideways world, one can conclude that the sideways time line is not chronological.
Now, when the island time lines reunified, the island events lasted another 14 days; while concurrently the sideways time events lasted only 7 days. But even those characters, like Locke, who died before the time merger, retained their memories in the sideways world which apparently was "created" by the island time lines merging after the Incident.
What fed the strong personal memories that created the sideways holding station? One could assume that it is the time riff itself that caused strong emotional bonds to be severed (and thus strongly remembered) until they could meet again. This philosophical approach parallels the ancient Egyptian burial ritual where the soul and body are separated then reunited in the after life. So the concept of Time was not really actual time in the show's construction, by a emotional capsule to capture the strong character bonds in order for them to good friends to help them move on in the after life. Perhaps there is an alternative time for a collective soul to acquire enough life force energy in order to make it to the next level of existence.
Now, when the island time lines reunified, the island events lasted another 14 days; while concurrently the sideways time events lasted only 7 days. But even those characters, like Locke, who died before the time merger, retained their memories in the sideways world which apparently was "created" by the island time lines merging after the Incident.
What fed the strong personal memories that created the sideways holding station? One could assume that it is the time riff itself that caused strong emotional bonds to be severed (and thus strongly remembered) until they could meet again. This philosophical approach parallels the ancient Egyptian burial ritual where the soul and body are separated then reunited in the after life. So the concept of Time was not really actual time in the show's construction, by a emotional capsule to capture the strong character bonds in order for them to good friends to help them move on in the after life. Perhaps there is an alternative time for a collective soul to acquire enough life force energy in order to make it to the next level of existence.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
TIME
One of the gnawing questions that remain in the LOST mythology is the concept of Time.
It is hard to understand how the writers viewed the concept of Time other than a convenient Deux Machina plot twist.
We were almost in a real time mode for the first four seasons. We saw the daily struggles of the main characters on the island. Time was a linear constant. Events followed a cause and effect pattern. Time seemed to pass normally.
Then the unexplained time and space shifts. The island disappears and the O6 survivors make it back to the mainland in late 2004 or early 2005. However, only a selected few of the island characters are time skipped to 1974 to live with Dharma for three years, while the ones left behind, especially Claire, have to fend for themselves on the island during that time period. We know Claire goes crazy in her fight against the Others. We know Sawyer becomes the new sheriff in the barracks past, and meets a young Ben before he is corrupted.
The O6 live for three years off the island. Then in 2007, they return to the island when the Ajira plane goes through the same island net. Again, for some unexplained reason, several of the passengers get time warped to 1977 Dharma while the rest crash land on the Hydra Island in 2007. However, is another side time realm, the ghosts of the characters created the sideways world living their lives as if it was 2004. And once the 1977 crew reunites with the 2007 island time line after the Incident, we get back to about 14 consecutive days of island events to the conclusion.
Besides the criticism that the whole time shift to the 1970s was irrelevant to the characters survival story, the 7 days that are the 2004 sideways event time line is still different than the 14 days island time line after the time shifters reunion.
Since the sideways world was an after life place for the dead, if it was created in 2004 at or about the plane crash time, why did it only move along for a week when the characters were living at least three years (1,095 days)? And since the sideways world moved along on a daily basis (we saw the events unfold in a normal order), does that really mean that the sideways world was actually created in late 2007, one week after the 1977 folks returned to the island?
So what happened on Day 7 in 2007 on the island to create the sideways world?
The main episode was called "Sundown." In it, the following events occurred:
We also get a window into Jacob's capture of Dogen's soul. It seems that Dogen was placed on the island as punishment for nearly killing his son in an auto accident. It seems like Dogen made a parental bargain with the devil - - - his life for that of his son's. So this adds a clue and a question of whether the island time was actually real, or in a different dimension like the sideways world.
The various time events do not synch up in any logical fashion.
Time, it appears, was merely used as a plot device to throw new dangers at characters or to misdirect or confuse the viewers who were seeking answers to the big questions.
It is hard to understand how the writers viewed the concept of Time other than a convenient Deux Machina plot twist.
Then the unexplained time and space shifts. The island disappears and the O6 survivors make it back to the mainland in late 2004 or early 2005. However, only a selected few of the island characters are time skipped to 1974 to live with Dharma for three years, while the ones left behind, especially Claire, have to fend for themselves on the island during that time period. We know Claire goes crazy in her fight against the Others. We know Sawyer becomes the new sheriff in the barracks past, and meets a young Ben before he is corrupted.
The O6 live for three years off the island. Then in 2007, they return to the island when the Ajira plane goes through the same island net. Again, for some unexplained reason, several of the passengers get time warped to 1977 Dharma while the rest crash land on the Hydra Island in 2007. However, is another side time realm, the ghosts of the characters created the sideways world living their lives as if it was 2004. And once the 1977 crew reunites with the 2007 island time line after the Incident, we get back to about 14 consecutive days of island events to the conclusion.
Besides the criticism that the whole time shift to the 1970s was irrelevant to the characters survival story, the 7 days that are the 2004 sideways event time line is still different than the 14 days island time line after the time shifters reunion.
Since the sideways world was an after life place for the dead, if it was created in 2004 at or about the plane crash time, why did it only move along for a week when the characters were living at least three years (1,095 days)? And since the sideways world moved along on a daily basis (we saw the events unfold in a normal order), does that really mean that the sideways world was actually created in late 2007, one week after the 1977 folks returned to the island?
So what happened on Day 7 in 2007 on the island to create the sideways world?
The main episode was called "Sundown." In it, the following events occurred:
- Sayid barges into Dogen's chamber, demanding answers. Dogen tells him that he believes him to be evil, and the discussion escalates into a fight, after which Dogen tells Sayid to leave the Temple and never come back.
- As Sayid is preparing to leave, Claire enters the Temple at the behest of the Man in Black, and tells Dogen to come out and speak with him. Dogen refuses, and sends Sayid instead, giving him and dagger and telling him to kill the Man in Black.
- Sayid leaves the Temple to meet the Man in Black, and on his way encounters Kate, who intending to return to the Temple and proceeds to do so. Upon encountering the Man in Black, Sayid stabs him with the knife given to him by Dogen to no effect. After this the two talk, and the Man in Black tells him that he can resurrect Nadia and to return to the Temple and tell everyone inside that if they do not leave by sundown, they will be killed.
- Upon returning to the Temple, Kate learns from Miles that Claire is there, and finds her, having been captured by the Others, in a hole inside the Temple. She tells him about Aaron and the fact that she raised him, and says she is here to save her. Claire responds that she is "not the one who needs saving."
- Sayid returns to the Temple and delivers this message, resulting in many Others leaving the Temple, including Cindy and the children. He then goes to the spring inside the Temple, where he meets Dogen. Dogen reveals to him that in his past life off the island, he was driving drunk with his son in the car and crashed. While he was in the hospital, Jacob came to him and said he would save his son's life if he came to the island. After he tells Sayid this, Sayid throws him into the spring and holds him under, drowning him. Lennon then walks in and is killed by Sayid with the knife given to him by Dogen.
- Immediately after Dogen's death, the Monster enters the Temple and begins killing everyone in sight. Just as he arrives, Ilana, Ben, Sun and Frank arrive at the Temple as well. The group sans Ben, who has went to find Sayid, meets up with Miles and escapes the Temple through a hidden passageway.
- Ben finds Sayid sitting over the bodies of Dogen and Lennon, and Sayid refuses to come with him. Meanwhile, Kate finds Claire, and together the two of them, along with Sayid, exit the temple to meet the Man in Black, along with the Others who left the Temple before Sundown. Then, led by the Main in Black, the group leaves the Temple.
- Escaping the Temple, Ben encounters Ilana, Frank, Sun and Miles some distance outside. Miles communicates with Jacob's spirit via his ashes, which Ilana took from the statue, and learns that Ben killed Jacob. After this they leave, heading for the beach camp.
We also get a window into Jacob's capture of Dogen's soul. It seems that Dogen was placed on the island as punishment for nearly killing his son in an auto accident. It seems like Dogen made a parental bargain with the devil - - - his life for that of his son's. So this adds a clue and a question of whether the island time was actually real, or in a different dimension like the sideways world.
The various time events do not synch up in any logical fashion.
Time, it appears, was merely used as a plot device to throw new dangers at characters or to misdirect or confuse the viewers who were seeking answers to the big questions.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
TIME LOOP
Another fan theory that was quite popular back in the day. This theory began near the end of the third season, and modified through to the end.
Fan Theory: Time Loop Theory
It suggests the island itself is in a perpetual time loop, disconnected from the time of the rest of the world, and pushing the button was resetting the time loop to keep it there. It's why people don't age, why women can't give birth and much, much more.
It's a very intriguing concept, but the time-travel exploration of the past two seasons suggests other ways these characters are zipping through time. It is like Groundhog Day but with a twist, as the day's events don't repeat themselves, just the characters biological state stays constant.
But there is a question why some people time shift and others did not. There is another question why some people like Desmond mentally time shifted and others did not. Some fans believe in the end time travel was not an explanation but red herring filler to keep the series on the air.
But for the sake of argument, if the island was in its own "time bubble," what could that mean? Clearly, one could consider this the "fountain of youth," a mythical place that explorers have tried to find since landing in the New World. Perhaps that is why Widmore was keen to return; after leaving the island, he began to age normally. Likewise, when Alpert was on the plane leaving the island, his hair began to gray.
But how time worked on the island would still be subject to debate. Women on the island did get pregnant and go through the first two trimesters. It was near the end that things would go wrong and the expectant mothers would die. So time does not fit a linear pattern, or even a daily skip. It was once described as a rapid river, and as such it meanders and at times circles back around events (rocks or obstacles).
If the island was out of time, then it would not have been difficult to find because an island is a stationary object. However, it was difficult to find so there is an element of spacial flux at work. Daniel's rocket experiment confirmed that the island itself was a moving object. This result defies normal Earth physics.
This brings into the realm of possibilities that this island is in a different dimension, where are thoughts and truths about physics and nature are different - - - altered but close to our experiences of reality.
If the characters are in a place that has shifted from both normal time and space, how could anyone leave to go back to their old life? The logical answer is that they cannot. They are trapped in this time-space sphere. But we were shown powerful people like Jacob leaving the island to recruit "candidates" to come to the island to joust with the Man in Black. We don't know if the island universe is a parallel one where everyone on Earth has a time-space shifted twin, but that fits into the mold of consistent sci-fi logic. The island then would be a sub-universe in a twin parallel universe, which would then mean that the "real" characters in our world were not harmed, aware or lost on the island. And the last statement is the problem with a time loop theory: to explain the concepts of the time bubble leads one to discount the connection to our own world.
For if the island time-space bubble was floating about on Earth, then those captured inside its time-space matrix would never be able to leave. Six days on the island could equate to six decades in the world outside the bubble. If one thinks that an element of quantum mechanics like time is embedded in each living organism's DNA, then removing that living thing from its normal environment would most likely cause death.
Time travel, mental time skipping and the like was a real problem in the LOST story lines. It was not well explained and mostly shown in contrary context to normal science fiction standards.
Fan Theory: Time Loop Theory
It suggests the island itself is in a perpetual time loop, disconnected from the time of the rest of the world, and pushing the button was resetting the time loop to keep it there. It's why people don't age, why women can't give birth and much, much more.
It's a very intriguing concept, but the time-travel exploration of the past two seasons suggests other ways these characters are zipping through time. It is like Groundhog Day but with a twist, as the day's events don't repeat themselves, just the characters biological state stays constant.
But there is a question why some people time shift and others did not. There is another question why some people like Desmond mentally time shifted and others did not. Some fans believe in the end time travel was not an explanation but red herring filler to keep the series on the air.
But for the sake of argument, if the island was in its own "time bubble," what could that mean? Clearly, one could consider this the "fountain of youth," a mythical place that explorers have tried to find since landing in the New World. Perhaps that is why Widmore was keen to return; after leaving the island, he began to age normally. Likewise, when Alpert was on the plane leaving the island, his hair began to gray.
But how time worked on the island would still be subject to debate. Women on the island did get pregnant and go through the first two trimesters. It was near the end that things would go wrong and the expectant mothers would die. So time does not fit a linear pattern, or even a daily skip. It was once described as a rapid river, and as such it meanders and at times circles back around events (rocks or obstacles).
If the island was out of time, then it would not have been difficult to find because an island is a stationary object. However, it was difficult to find so there is an element of spacial flux at work. Daniel's rocket experiment confirmed that the island itself was a moving object. This result defies normal Earth physics.
This brings into the realm of possibilities that this island is in a different dimension, where are thoughts and truths about physics and nature are different - - - altered but close to our experiences of reality.
If the characters are in a place that has shifted from both normal time and space, how could anyone leave to go back to their old life? The logical answer is that they cannot. They are trapped in this time-space sphere. But we were shown powerful people like Jacob leaving the island to recruit "candidates" to come to the island to joust with the Man in Black. We don't know if the island universe is a parallel one where everyone on Earth has a time-space shifted twin, but that fits into the mold of consistent sci-fi logic. The island then would be a sub-universe in a twin parallel universe, which would then mean that the "real" characters in our world were not harmed, aware or lost on the island. And the last statement is the problem with a time loop theory: to explain the concepts of the time bubble leads one to discount the connection to our own world.
For if the island time-space bubble was floating about on Earth, then those captured inside its time-space matrix would never be able to leave. Six days on the island could equate to six decades in the world outside the bubble. If one thinks that an element of quantum mechanics like time is embedded in each living organism's DNA, then removing that living thing from its normal environment would most likely cause death.
Time travel, mental time skipping and the like was a real problem in the LOST story lines. It was not well explained and mostly shown in contrary context to normal science fiction standards.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
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).
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).
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, March 31, 2014
LOST ELEMENTS EXPLAINED
There were several major elements in the LOST saga which do not appear to be compatible.
The first, and most confusing aspect to LOST, was time travel. The idea of a human being going back and forth to the past or the future is physically impossible. It is pure science fiction. It is a device to throw a character into an unknown situation in order to elicit a reaction.
Second, there was concepts of the supernatural. The smoke monster does not exist in our current world. It has to be something supernatural, beyond nature, because we know that smoke cannot aggregate, travel with intelligence, steal the minds of individuals and transform into human beings. This is also science fiction.
But every person today time travels. People time travel every day of their lives, and not just in the linear clock from dawn to dusk. People who access their memories are effectively time traveling back to their past. Those memories can be good or bad. But they are strong enough emotionally to be stored in one's long term memory.
People also time travel to the future. It is called dreams. The element of subconscious interplay with memories, experience, emotions and events creates a fantasy scape similar to the manifestation of a smoke monster. Depending on whether a person can control their dreams, then act upon them during their waking lives, is transformational.
A child could dream to one day become a fire fighter. He can imagine himself as a grown man riding in a hook and ladder engine racing to a blazing fire. He takes those dreams and places them into his memory. He uses his subconscious to help him run scenarios on how to achieve his goal. As he grows up, he channels his time and resources into becoming a fireman. He goes to school. He stays physically fit. He enrolls in the academy. He works on his training. He reaches his goal and then assigned to a fire station.
It may take years in order to accomplish such dream. But that is why people need to sleep - - - to recharge their physical body, but also organize their mind to meet their dreams. A cluttered or disrupted mind will not help a person achieve their goals; it may create the situation where nightmares begin to control their thoughts - - - making them a mental wreck.
The time travel and supernatural elements to the series may be only metaphors for a series of character developments as individuals try to take control of their own fantasies without applying their dreams in their waking lives. It is only when a person has the courage to take action on their inner feelings in their waking life can there be true change and new beginnings. Instead of "what could be" a person who awakes with road map to a goal, can achieve that goal - - - whether it be a career, a project completion, or even relationships.
The first, and most confusing aspect to LOST, was time travel. The idea of a human being going back and forth to the past or the future is physically impossible. It is pure science fiction. It is a device to throw a character into an unknown situation in order to elicit a reaction.
Second, there was concepts of the supernatural. The smoke monster does not exist in our current world. It has to be something supernatural, beyond nature, because we know that smoke cannot aggregate, travel with intelligence, steal the minds of individuals and transform into human beings. This is also science fiction.
But every person today time travels. People time travel every day of their lives, and not just in the linear clock from dawn to dusk. People who access their memories are effectively time traveling back to their past. Those memories can be good or bad. But they are strong enough emotionally to be stored in one's long term memory.
People also time travel to the future. It is called dreams. The element of subconscious interplay with memories, experience, emotions and events creates a fantasy scape similar to the manifestation of a smoke monster. Depending on whether a person can control their dreams, then act upon them during their waking lives, is transformational.
A child could dream to one day become a fire fighter. He can imagine himself as a grown man riding in a hook and ladder engine racing to a blazing fire. He takes those dreams and places them into his memory. He uses his subconscious to help him run scenarios on how to achieve his goal. As he grows up, he channels his time and resources into becoming a fireman. He goes to school. He stays physically fit. He enrolls in the academy. He works on his training. He reaches his goal and then assigned to a fire station.
It may take years in order to accomplish such dream. But that is why people need to sleep - - - to recharge their physical body, but also organize their mind to meet their dreams. A cluttered or disrupted mind will not help a person achieve their goals; it may create the situation where nightmares begin to control their thoughts - - - making them a mental wreck.
The time travel and supernatural elements to the series may be only metaphors for a series of character developments as individuals try to take control of their own fantasies without applying their dreams in their waking lives. It is only when a person has the courage to take action on their inner feelings in their waking life can there be true change and new beginnings. Instead of "what could be" a person who awakes with road map to a goal, can achieve that goal - - - whether it be a career, a project completion, or even relationships.
Monday, December 2, 2013
THE BEN PROBLEM
There are many documented problems with the LOST story. These problems deal with story structure and the events viewers saw during the series. These go beyond continuity issues or shooting errors, but to major plot point questions.
One of the least discussed problems is with Ben.
And it deals with the traditional paradox of time travel.
A paradox a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory. As Issac Asimov explained the classic literary example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” This event would change the person's world so dramatically, that the killer would not be born. So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes…that the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible, Asimov said.
The grandfather paradox is from time travel literature which states that a person who goes back in time can massively alter future events.
When a few of the 815 survivors time travel to Dharmaville in 1974, a young boy is already present on the island. His name was Ben Linus. He was an unhappy boy. His father was a drunk janitor who blamed his wife death on Ben. (She died during child birth). As a result, Ben and his father were never close. Ben was brought to the island by his father because he needed work. Ben became an introvert and apparently only had one friend in the island school. At some time, Ben began to see visions of his dead mother in the jungle. Ben became rebellious over the the Dharma rules, and he sought out to join the Others. He met Richard Alpert in the jungle, but Ben was told it was not time yet.
But whatever time line was supposed to happen, changed when the 815ers time traveled to 1974. During the encounter with Sayid in 1977, Ben was mortally wounded in the chest. Juliet could not do anything to save Ben. Jack refused to help, knowing what adult Ben would do to them after Flight 815 crashed on the island. So Juliet and Kate take it upon themselves to deliver bleeding Ben to Alpert. Alpert takes Ben, but tells them he would be "forever changed." Ben is taken to the temple to be saved.
And here is begins the problem. Juliet, a medical doctor, could not save Ben from dying of his wounds. If Ben was taken to the temple, we have to assume that the same ceremony would have been performed by Dogen as he did on mortally wounded Sayid after the time skips stopped. When Sayid was treated in the temple pool, he died. But much later, he was reincarnated as a soul less Sayid who recognized his own internal darkness.
One has to assume that Ben also "died" in the temple, because medical science could not save him. And if he died and then was "reincarnated," he also became evil. Now, some people will say that assumption is false. Ben was "saved" by the Others so he grew up as he normally did prior to the time skips. However, if as a boy being shot in 1977, Ben would have had to change his personality and outlook on life.
But another problem with the major time event is that Ben did not remember Sayid when Flight 815 crashed on the island. Would you not remember who shot you at point blank range? Now, some may argue that Ben would have not known of Sayid because the shooting did not take place until later in the series. But we are not talking about seasonal episode air dates as being relevant. The story stated Ben was shot in 1977. Then 30 years later, his killer returns to his island.
Ben knows just about everything about the island, so his boyhood memories would not have been erased. He began the Other's spy within the Dharma group. He rose up to take command of the Others by purging the Dharma people with poison gas. He should have known about Sayid.
Further, if Ben died in 1977, there would have been no Ben led Dharma group bent on kidnapping and terrorizing the 815 survivors.
Another problem is what did Ben become after the temple ritual. Clearly, if he followed Sayid's path, Ben was a soul less being - - - which could have been manipulated by Jacob or MIB. But then again, why did Ben get a second chance at life when the other people on the island did not? Or did the temple waters actually create a new smoke monster in the form of Ben?
It set into motion the same type of mass destruction we have seen other smoke monsters, like Crazy Mother, do to inhabitants on the island.
The writers cannot give us a grandfather paradox moment and not explain why there was no consequences in the future.
One of the least discussed problems is with Ben.
And it deals with the traditional paradox of time travel.
A paradox a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory. As Issac Asimov explained the classic literary example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” This event would change the person's world so dramatically, that the killer would not be born. So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes…that the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible, Asimov said.
The grandfather paradox is from time travel literature which states that a person who goes back in time can massively alter future events.
When a few of the 815 survivors time travel to Dharmaville in 1974, a young boy is already present on the island. His name was Ben Linus. He was an unhappy boy. His father was a drunk janitor who blamed his wife death on Ben. (She died during child birth). As a result, Ben and his father were never close. Ben was brought to the island by his father because he needed work. Ben became an introvert and apparently only had one friend in the island school. At some time, Ben began to see visions of his dead mother in the jungle. Ben became rebellious over the the Dharma rules, and he sought out to join the Others. He met Richard Alpert in the jungle, but Ben was told it was not time yet.
But whatever time line was supposed to happen, changed when the 815ers time traveled to 1974. During the encounter with Sayid in 1977, Ben was mortally wounded in the chest. Juliet could not do anything to save Ben. Jack refused to help, knowing what adult Ben would do to them after Flight 815 crashed on the island. So Juliet and Kate take it upon themselves to deliver bleeding Ben to Alpert. Alpert takes Ben, but tells them he would be "forever changed." Ben is taken to the temple to be saved.
And here is begins the problem. Juliet, a medical doctor, could not save Ben from dying of his wounds. If Ben was taken to the temple, we have to assume that the same ceremony would have been performed by Dogen as he did on mortally wounded Sayid after the time skips stopped. When Sayid was treated in the temple pool, he died. But much later, he was reincarnated as a soul less Sayid who recognized his own internal darkness.
One has to assume that Ben also "died" in the temple, because medical science could not save him. And if he died and then was "reincarnated," he also became evil. Now, some people will say that assumption is false. Ben was "saved" by the Others so he grew up as he normally did prior to the time skips. However, if as a boy being shot in 1977, Ben would have had to change his personality and outlook on life.
But another problem with the major time event is that Ben did not remember Sayid when Flight 815 crashed on the island. Would you not remember who shot you at point blank range? Now, some may argue that Ben would have not known of Sayid because the shooting did not take place until later in the series. But we are not talking about seasonal episode air dates as being relevant. The story stated Ben was shot in 1977. Then 30 years later, his killer returns to his island.
Ben knows just about everything about the island, so his boyhood memories would not have been erased. He began the Other's spy within the Dharma group. He rose up to take command of the Others by purging the Dharma people with poison gas. He should have known about Sayid.
Further, if Ben died in 1977, there would have been no Ben led Dharma group bent on kidnapping and terrorizing the 815 survivors.
Another problem is what did Ben become after the temple ritual. Clearly, if he followed Sayid's path, Ben was a soul less being - - - which could have been manipulated by Jacob or MIB. But then again, why did Ben get a second chance at life when the other people on the island did not? Or did the temple waters actually create a new smoke monster in the form of Ben?
It set into motion the same type of mass destruction we have seen other smoke monsters, like Crazy Mother, do to inhabitants on the island.
The writers cannot give us a grandfather paradox moment and not explain why there was no consequences in the future.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
CONCEPT OF TIME
In our modern society, we see time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. It is linear. There is a beginning, middle toward the end. But throughout history, there have been cultures who viewed time differently.
The ancient Mayans believed in three different time periods, and took great significance when they time lines crossed paths. The first was cosmic time, charting the constellations, stars, sun and moon to create highly accurate predictions of future solar events. The second was a biologic time, the gestation period for human reproduction (9 months). The third was the seasonal clock which forecast the planting and harvest seasons in relation to the light and darkness of each sun and lunar cycle.
One of the issues with LOST itself was how the series dealt with basic elements of time.
The passage of time was a recurring theme in the series. Characters traveled in time coming and leaving the island, and skipped randomly through time over a series of episodes. Time also serves as a general recurring theme, with frequent references to time and appearances of clocks and watches.The show's format was also a non-linear narrative. LOST consistently played with time by presenting events out of their chronological order. Initially, action alternated between current events on the island and pre-crash flashbacks. Later episodes featured extended flashbacks and and flashbacks to on-island events. Later, the series featured flash-forwards and physical physical time travel occurred in Season 5. Then there was the concept of mental time flashes which Desmond had of future events. Then, the action alternated between on-island events and events from the characters' after life which we called the sideways world.
Within the series, time was explained as a river stream, following not in a straight line, but meandering about (so there is a possibility of circling back in a specific time line). Time was also explained as a loop; that certain events would come back around again (such as the survivors re-living events in their past in the island present.) But what most viewers believe is that we live in a linear time existence: we are born, we live X number of years, then we die. LOST never explained how this common concept of time was true or false in the LOST universe.
There is a common expression that "you only have one life to live." It is a speech that each individual must live his or her own life to the fullest, because there are no "do-overs." But in the LOST story, there appeared to be several instances of characters being able to "do over" their past mistakes, or change their regrettable existence. Now, this is clouded by the intervention of a sideways after life world which may or may not contain the island time as a subset of an alternative reality.
So the concept of time cannot give us a definitive clue of how the LOST universe was constructed or how it operated in relation to the flashback events.
The ancient Mayans believed in three different time periods, and took great significance when they time lines crossed paths. The first was cosmic time, charting the constellations, stars, sun and moon to create highly accurate predictions of future solar events. The second was a biologic time, the gestation period for human reproduction (9 months). The third was the seasonal clock which forecast the planting and harvest seasons in relation to the light and darkness of each sun and lunar cycle.
The passage of time was a recurring theme in the series. Characters traveled in time coming and leaving the island, and skipped randomly through time over a series of episodes. Time also serves as a general recurring theme, with frequent references to time and appearances of clocks and watches.The show's format was also a non-linear narrative. LOST consistently played with time by presenting events out of their chronological order. Initially, action alternated between current events on the island and pre-crash flashbacks. Later episodes featured extended flashbacks and and flashbacks to on-island events. Later, the series featured flash-forwards and physical physical time travel occurred in Season 5. Then there was the concept of mental time flashes which Desmond had of future events. Then, the action alternated between on-island events and events from the characters' after life which we called the sideways world.
Within the series, time was explained as a river stream, following not in a straight line, but meandering about (so there is a possibility of circling back in a specific time line). Time was also explained as a loop; that certain events would come back around again (such as the survivors re-living events in their past in the island present.) But what most viewers believe is that we live in a linear time existence: we are born, we live X number of years, then we die. LOST never explained how this common concept of time was true or false in the LOST universe.
There is a common expression that "you only have one life to live." It is a speech that each individual must live his or her own life to the fullest, because there are no "do-overs." But in the LOST story, there appeared to be several instances of characters being able to "do over" their past mistakes, or change their regrettable existence. Now, this is clouded by the intervention of a sideways after life world which may or may not contain the island time as a subset of an alternative reality.
So the concept of time cannot give us a definitive clue of how the LOST universe was constructed or how it operated in relation to the flashback events.
Friday, November 1, 2013
DEAD ENDS
The problem with time travel science fiction is that you have to get it right or it is a mess.
Time travel was a recurring theme of the series, and referenced in different ways such as the Island "moving" and teleportation of the user of the ancient frozen donkey wheel under the Orchid station. It was said that the electromagnetic power on the Island allows the inhabitants to travel through time. However, the narrative changed when characters began to consciously time travel (not physically) which often end with death, due to the inability to find a "constant."
Here were the writer's various explanations for time travel during the series:
1. Faraday says the island is like a spinning record on a turntable, but now the record is skipping after Ben's turn of the FDW. He said it may have "dislodged" us from Time.
2. In the Orchid orientation film, it was stated that Dharma was "to conduct unique experiments of both space and time." Candle placed rabbit number 15 inside a device he called the "vault", which was constructed adjacent to "negatively charged exotic matter." He explained how the rabbit would travel 100ms ahead of four dimensional spacetime - three consisting of space and one of time.
3. When Desmond had time skipped into the past, he went to Oxford to find Faraday. Faraday demonstrated to Desmond that he could transport a lab rat's consciousness forward in time. He did that by using a machine he designed which emitted an unknown radiation, set to 2.342 and oscillating at eleven hertz. Once exposed, the rat was able to move directly from one end of a maze to another. Faraday explained that he was not going teach the rat to run the maze for another hour. Later, however, the rat died of what Faraday said was likely a brain aneurysm.
4. Desmond's consciousness randomly traveled through time between December 24, 2004 and an unknown date in 1996. Faraday stressed that for a mind to survive the continued transitions of temporal displacement, and to make it stop, it needs to find a "constant," or anchor, to focus on. This constant must be something that means a great deal to the person, and it has to be present in both time periods. For his constant, Desmond chose Penny.
5. When Desmond first encountered Eloise Hawking, she explained there are rules for time travel: that "the universe has a way of course correcting or fate may intervene to any changes. If a man was supposed to die in an accident but survived, fate would create another event in which the man would die.
6. The effects of time travel on the traveler seem to be similar whether the travel is physical, or where just the consciousness travels. In both cases, temporal displacement causes nose bleeds, headaches, forgetfulness, and in the worst cases, death by apparent brain aneurysm. However, the severity of the effects appears to differ from person to person. However, people right next to a time skipping person, such as Danielle with Jin, were unaffected by the time displacement.
So which explanation of LOST's time travel is correct?
One would have to conclude that none are the correct answer. The conclusion is based upon the fact that each alleged time travel rule was inconsistently applied through the story line. If one person is affected by physical or mental time travel, but the person standing right next to him (under the same conditions) does not have any time travel affects, the explanation is a nullity.
If the island was Faraday's conscious time machine but in a scaled up version, then everyone on the island would have been affected with mental time skips. But that did not happen. The same is true with the physical time travel: only a few of the 815 survivors were teleported back to the Dharma 1970s while the others were stuck in the present.
But the most egregious violations of time travel rules occurs during the physical skips. When Locke skips in front of Alpert, it makes little sense considering that Alpert had been on the island longer than Locke. Common sense would state that Alpert should have skipped along with Locke. In addition, when Faraday is killed by his mother in 1977, how could he have been born later? The same is true for Charlotte, who claimed to have returned to the island but died during time travel. Lastly, when Juliet is trapped in the hole with the atomic bomb, she is in the 1970s Dharma era. When there is the final time flash, she blurts out "it worked," but we still don't know what she is talking about. She dies in the rebooted present. Is that course correction at work? And did this change Juliet's past life, i.e. in the sideways world ending she had no contact with her sister, her closest friend, who would have been her "constant."
In fact, the whole notion of needing a constant was ridiculous. Under the definition of a constant ("something that means a great deal to the person"), everyone has multiple constants in their lives to focus upon, including parents, spouses, children, family, friends and even favorite sports teams. Minkowski had a family; Charlotte had her "work." Therefore, neither should have died as a result of failing to have a constant in their lives.
The physical time travel story arc led to a dead end, since the alleged explosion of the atomic bomb did not change anything. Desmond's mental time skipping to the past or future did not change anything - - - people still died. In fact, all these time story lines led to dead ends.
In show biz that is called "filler." The principle is to throw new tangents in order to keep the audience engaged. But adding filler tied to science concepts without a reasonable explanation of how things are applied to all the characters is poor execution. You could cut out all the time travel story plot lines from the series and viewers would not miss anything.
We cannot even say the time skipping created any alternative universe. TPTB continue to claim that all the island events were "real," but one can question in what "reality?" The notion that the numerous time skips did not cause massive changes in the course of non-island events is also hard to believe if the island was the source for life, death and rebirth (in essence the creator of time and space itself). But the writers never tackled that concept or the unintended consequences of throwing in time travel into an adventure-survival story.
Some fans still believe the time travel arcs in LOST were the most disappointing feature of the series. It is even more so when the character "experts" in the show itself, were wrong in their explanation of events. Time travel in the series was like white noise, TV static or a blank box.
Time travel was a recurring theme of the series, and referenced in different ways such as the Island "moving" and teleportation of the user of the ancient frozen donkey wheel under the Orchid station. It was said that the electromagnetic power on the Island allows the inhabitants to travel through time. However, the narrative changed when characters began to consciously time travel (not physically) which often end with death, due to the inability to find a "constant."
Here were the writer's various explanations for time travel during the series:
1. Faraday says the island is like a spinning record on a turntable, but now the record is skipping after Ben's turn of the FDW. He said it may have "dislodged" us from Time.
2. In the Orchid orientation film, it was stated that Dharma was "to conduct unique experiments of both space and time." Candle placed rabbit number 15 inside a device he called the "vault", which was constructed adjacent to "negatively charged exotic matter." He explained how the rabbit would travel 100ms ahead of four dimensional spacetime - three consisting of space and one of time.
3. When Desmond had time skipped into the past, he went to Oxford to find Faraday. Faraday demonstrated to Desmond that he could transport a lab rat's consciousness forward in time. He did that by using a machine he designed which emitted an unknown radiation, set to 2.342 and oscillating at eleven hertz. Once exposed, the rat was able to move directly from one end of a maze to another. Faraday explained that he was not going teach the rat to run the maze for another hour. Later, however, the rat died of what Faraday said was likely a brain aneurysm.
4. Desmond's consciousness randomly traveled through time between December 24, 2004 and an unknown date in 1996. Faraday stressed that for a mind to survive the continued transitions of temporal displacement, and to make it stop, it needs to find a "constant," or anchor, to focus on. This constant must be something that means a great deal to the person, and it has to be present in both time periods. For his constant, Desmond chose Penny.
5. When Desmond first encountered Eloise Hawking, she explained there are rules for time travel: that "the universe has a way of course correcting or fate may intervene to any changes. If a man was supposed to die in an accident but survived, fate would create another event in which the man would die.
6. The effects of time travel on the traveler seem to be similar whether the travel is physical, or where just the consciousness travels. In both cases, temporal displacement causes nose bleeds, headaches, forgetfulness, and in the worst cases, death by apparent brain aneurysm. However, the severity of the effects appears to differ from person to person. However, people right next to a time skipping person, such as Danielle with Jin, were unaffected by the time displacement.
So which explanation of LOST's time travel is correct?
One would have to conclude that none are the correct answer. The conclusion is based upon the fact that each alleged time travel rule was inconsistently applied through the story line. If one person is affected by physical or mental time travel, but the person standing right next to him (under the same conditions) does not have any time travel affects, the explanation is a nullity.
If the island was Faraday's conscious time machine but in a scaled up version, then everyone on the island would have been affected with mental time skips. But that did not happen. The same is true with the physical time travel: only a few of the 815 survivors were teleported back to the Dharma 1970s while the others were stuck in the present.
But the most egregious violations of time travel rules occurs during the physical skips. When Locke skips in front of Alpert, it makes little sense considering that Alpert had been on the island longer than Locke. Common sense would state that Alpert should have skipped along with Locke. In addition, when Faraday is killed by his mother in 1977, how could he have been born later? The same is true for Charlotte, who claimed to have returned to the island but died during time travel. Lastly, when Juliet is trapped in the hole with the atomic bomb, she is in the 1970s Dharma era. When there is the final time flash, she blurts out "it worked," but we still don't know what she is talking about. She dies in the rebooted present. Is that course correction at work? And did this change Juliet's past life, i.e. in the sideways world ending she had no contact with her sister, her closest friend, who would have been her "constant."
In fact, the whole notion of needing a constant was ridiculous. Under the definition of a constant ("something that means a great deal to the person"), everyone has multiple constants in their lives to focus upon, including parents, spouses, children, family, friends and even favorite sports teams. Minkowski had a family; Charlotte had her "work." Therefore, neither should have died as a result of failing to have a constant in their lives.
The physical time travel story arc led to a dead end, since the alleged explosion of the atomic bomb did not change anything. Desmond's mental time skipping to the past or future did not change anything - - - people still died. In fact, all these time story lines led to dead ends.
In show biz that is called "filler." The principle is to throw new tangents in order to keep the audience engaged. But adding filler tied to science concepts without a reasonable explanation of how things are applied to all the characters is poor execution. You could cut out all the time travel story plot lines from the series and viewers would not miss anything.
We cannot even say the time skipping created any alternative universe. TPTB continue to claim that all the island events were "real," but one can question in what "reality?" The notion that the numerous time skips did not cause massive changes in the course of non-island events is also hard to believe if the island was the source for life, death and rebirth (in essence the creator of time and space itself). But the writers never tackled that concept or the unintended consequences of throwing in time travel into an adventure-survival story.
Some fans still believe the time travel arcs in LOST were the most disappointing feature of the series. It is even more so when the character "experts" in the show itself, were wrong in their explanation of events. Time travel in the series was like white noise, TV static or a blank box.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
REVIEW: THEORIES PART 2
In the next installment of popular pre-Season 6 theories includes the collective notion that the characters have fallen by accident into a time rift.
There are many clues which supported this theory: the fact the island's time was different than the freighter's; that the light refracted differently on the island than on the sea; that the rocket experiment showed a major difference in both space and time (as the results indicated that the island was moving away from the freighter, perhaps going faster than the rotation of the earth because of a time shift); that several characters began to time skip while on the island; that Ben traveled off the island by turning the FDW but to arrive at a different date in the Arab desert; and that the island was "difficult" or impossible to find.
A few commentators tried to establish a purpose for this Earth bound time anomaly. Why was the island so important that powerful men would kill in order to control it? And why was the military and science community (Dharma) so eager to set up stations on the island?
When viewers realized that the Numbers may represent the The Valenzetti Equation which is the mathematical equation developed by the reclusive Princeton University mathematician Enzo Valenzetti. It was created following the Cuban Missile Crisis by the United States and the Soviet Union to find a solution to the hostility and danger of imminent global disaster created by the Cold War. The equation was secretly commissioned through the UN Security Council and is used to predict the time of human extinction.
According to the 1975 orientation film, the Valenzetti Equation "predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself."
Some propose that the island was the receiver for messages from mankind's future. The island had to straddle the time continuum of the present and the future in order to send/receive information.
As such, some speculate that some major disaster has happened in the future, and those in the future have managed to alert some people in the past by sending messages back in an attempt to prevent it. These futurists were attempting to alter the island present in tiny ways hoping that it will cause a chain reaction that will eventually lead to the prevention of the disaster. The theory believes that everyone on the island has a part, big or small, to play in eventually stopping this future disaster.
Because the island has a strange magnetic field, futurists are able to focus their messages to the island so they can be understood by a less advanced human race. As such, they may have used symbolic meaning for complex subject matter, which may have led to a series strange things happening, such as the creation of the smoke monster from the messages or memories of those human receivers in the past. The power to hear what could only be perceived as messages from the heavens may have been discovered by Dharma, or possibly the original Others.
To some these future messages are just images, random things like the numbers appearing on objects. Other people can understand the messages better, such as the Others on the Island and possibly those on Jacob's List. To the chosen ones, the messages may be clearer. The chosen ones may be in a position to decode the messages in order to the disaster.
Ramping up to Season 6, the issue of past and present and time have become quite important, especially with Desmond's developing story arc of having time flashes into the future. Sub-conscious messages from the future could also explain how certain characters and supporting characters seem to know what is going to happen, or why everyone in the show appears to be some how connected.
The future disaster may have something to do with fertility. The Others have always seemed interested in children, especially Claire's baby. In Season 3, we were shown a scan of a 27 year old woman with the womb of a 70 year old.
The Others keep saying they are "the good guys," which could mean that they God's chosen people to receive his messages to save mankind. They at least believe that they are doing good work. The List they have might be warning about who is useful in preventing the disaster, or who might cause the disaster. It opens the spiritual context to the show.
The concept that LOST could have been centered around alien messages (as opposed to aliens themselves) is a good sci-fi basis in which to develop a complex story line. However, we are never told what the future "disaster" is that our heroes need to prevent. No one in the series explains to us the messages other than the vague excuse "this is what Jacob wants." We will learn that the immortal Jacob is the island's guardian, but he does not divulge anything about the future to the island inhabitants. He is only concerned about finding his successor. It is sort of like a lonely light house keeper trying to trick another individual to take his place on a cold rock so he could escape his island prison. It may be noble work; but it is not rewarding to the light house keeper.
If the future messages were sent to create change for the planet, none of the main characters had the ability to make any global impact. Yes, a few were wealthy like Sun or Widmore, but they did not show any humanitarian purpose in their actions surrounding the island. And as Season 6 would unfold, the time angle of the series became moot. There was no great cry to save the human race from destruction. It was a temperate plea not to let Flocke escape the island, for some unexplained reason. Even if Flocke represented the devil who would be unleashed on mankind, there was plenty of back story evil in the world that that event would not make much of a difference one way or the other.
It is clear this sci-fi theory did have roots in the early plot lines of the series, but in the end science fiction was cast to the curb and not a factor in the main characters personal story endings.
There are many clues which supported this theory: the fact the island's time was different than the freighter's; that the light refracted differently on the island than on the sea; that the rocket experiment showed a major difference in both space and time (as the results indicated that the island was moving away from the freighter, perhaps going faster than the rotation of the earth because of a time shift); that several characters began to time skip while on the island; that Ben traveled off the island by turning the FDW but to arrive at a different date in the Arab desert; and that the island was "difficult" or impossible to find.
A few commentators tried to establish a purpose for this Earth bound time anomaly. Why was the island so important that powerful men would kill in order to control it? And why was the military and science community (Dharma) so eager to set up stations on the island?
When viewers realized that the Numbers may represent the The Valenzetti Equation which is the mathematical equation developed by the reclusive Princeton University mathematician Enzo Valenzetti. It was created following the Cuban Missile Crisis by the United States and the Soviet Union to find a solution to the hostility and danger of imminent global disaster created by the Cold War. The equation was secretly commissioned through the UN Security Council and is used to predict the time of human extinction.
According to the 1975 orientation film, the Valenzetti Equation "predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself."
Some propose that the island was the receiver for messages from mankind's future. The island had to straddle the time continuum of the present and the future in order to send/receive information.
As such, some speculate that some major disaster has happened in the future, and those in the future have managed to alert some people in the past by sending messages back in an attempt to prevent it. These futurists were attempting to alter the island present in tiny ways hoping that it will cause a chain reaction that will eventually lead to the prevention of the disaster. The theory believes that everyone on the island has a part, big or small, to play in eventually stopping this future disaster.
Because the island has a strange magnetic field, futurists are able to focus their messages to the island so they can be understood by a less advanced human race. As such, they may have used symbolic meaning for complex subject matter, which may have led to a series strange things happening, such as the creation of the smoke monster from the messages or memories of those human receivers in the past. The power to hear what could only be perceived as messages from the heavens may have been discovered by Dharma, or possibly the original Others.
To some these future messages are just images, random things like the numbers appearing on objects. Other people can understand the messages better, such as the Others on the Island and possibly those on Jacob's List. To the chosen ones, the messages may be clearer. The chosen ones may be in a position to decode the messages in order to the disaster.
Ramping up to Season 6, the issue of past and present and time have become quite important, especially with Desmond's developing story arc of having time flashes into the future. Sub-conscious messages from the future could also explain how certain characters and supporting characters seem to know what is going to happen, or why everyone in the show appears to be some how connected.
The future disaster may have something to do with fertility. The Others have always seemed interested in children, especially Claire's baby. In Season 3, we were shown a scan of a 27 year old woman with the womb of a 70 year old.
The Others keep saying they are "the good guys," which could mean that they God's chosen people to receive his messages to save mankind. They at least believe that they are doing good work. The List they have might be warning about who is useful in preventing the disaster, or who might cause the disaster. It opens the spiritual context to the show.
The concept that LOST could have been centered around alien messages (as opposed to aliens themselves) is a good sci-fi basis in which to develop a complex story line. However, we are never told what the future "disaster" is that our heroes need to prevent. No one in the series explains to us the messages other than the vague excuse "this is what Jacob wants." We will learn that the immortal Jacob is the island's guardian, but he does not divulge anything about the future to the island inhabitants. He is only concerned about finding his successor. It is sort of like a lonely light house keeper trying to trick another individual to take his place on a cold rock so he could escape his island prison. It may be noble work; but it is not rewarding to the light house keeper.
If the future messages were sent to create change for the planet, none of the main characters had the ability to make any global impact. Yes, a few were wealthy like Sun or Widmore, but they did not show any humanitarian purpose in their actions surrounding the island. And as Season 6 would unfold, the time angle of the series became moot. There was no great cry to save the human race from destruction. It was a temperate plea not to let Flocke escape the island, for some unexplained reason. Even if Flocke represented the devil who would be unleashed on mankind, there was plenty of back story evil in the world that that event would not make much of a difference one way or the other.
It is clear this sci-fi theory did have roots in the early plot lines of the series, but in the end science fiction was cast to the curb and not a factor in the main characters personal story endings.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
