Note

Note: This is a draft of a chapter from a book I am working on. Update: see comments from "The Beginning of the End" and other Season 4 episodes at the end Updated 2-12-08

Chapter 10: “See You in Another Life, Brother”: Time Travel, Déjà vu, and Free Will

As we have noted several times, Lost has, at its very core, an exploration of the dynamic tension between self and other. The definition of “other” varies throughout the text of the series, including geographical, cultural, and racial senses, among others. Time, in the form of flashbacks, is also regularly utilized to delineate between “who we are” as opposed to “who we were.” With the airing of episode 56 (3.8), “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” (henceforth referred to as FBYE) an additional “otherness” was added to the mythology, namely the suggestion of the existence of alternate histories in a single universe, or actual time travel between parallel histories in different universes, as a result of time travel into the past (and possibly the future). The exploration of time travel is certainly not unique to Lost. Novels such as Timeline and The Time Traveler’s Wife, films such as The Terminator, Back to the Future, The Last Mimzy, and Meet the Robinsons, and tv series such as Quantum Leap and Journeyman have exploited (and perhaps further fueled) the public’s appetite to explore this most speculative of “what if” scenarios.

Although time travel and alternate universes are commonly thought to be relegated to the realm of science fiction, there are firm scientific bases for discussing the real possibility of both concepts. With this in mind, let’s travel through space and time ourselves in this chapter, exploring both the centrality of these concepts to the Lost canon, and the science which just might make such wonders possible in our lifetimes.

Time itself is a major character in Lost. In addition to the natural cycles of sunrise/sunset and the phases of the moon, the constant repetition of Rousseau’s distress call and the 108 minute cycle of the Swan Station’s infamous button provide additional methods of measuring the passage of time. References to time abound throughout the three aired seasons. Jin and Sun had been on the Oceanic flight 815 because he had been sent to deliver expensive watches to his father-in-law’s associates in Sydney and Los Angeles. Reportedly there was a line cut from Rousseau’s dialogue where she explained that her research group had been studying time (O’Conner and Stewart 2006, 254). Numerous characters seemingly toss out casual references to future lives with more frequency than the average Buddhist. Besides Desmond’s often repeated “See you in another life, brother,” Dave repeats the same admonition to Hurley in episode 42 (2.18), “Dave” (the number 42 being symbolic in and of itself as the answer to life, the universe, and everything, at least in the universe of Douglas Adams), and Nadia inscribes a similar plea to Sayid on the back of her photograph in “Solitary” (1.9). There are events which suggest that time seems to run at a strange rate on the island. For example, in “Exodus, Part I,” (1.23) the wreckage of the Black Rock appears to be from the 19^th century, but the dynamite it contains has somehow managed to survive intact (albeit in a rather unstable state). In “The Long Con,” (2.13) Hurley jokingly suggests that they’ve picked up radio signals from another time at the end of the episode when he and Sayid listen to Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” on a shortwave radio. The use of the dramatic devise of the flashback, an integral part of Lost, also adds to the nonlinear enfolding of the storyline. Finally, there are Desmond’s supposed premonitions in Season 3, where he can predict selected future events such as Locke’s rallying speech and threats to Charlie’s life.

There are also several literary references to time travel or interdimensional travel included in show canon. For example, one of the books read by Sawyer in Season 1 is A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. In this work, three children journey with the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit, Which, and Who through the fifth dimension, called a tesseract in this work, to defeat evil and rescue the scientist father of two of the children. In “The Greater Good,”(1.21) one of Sayid’s friends is seen playing the video game Half-life in a flashback, a game in which the player takes on the role of a scientist who has, quite accidentally of course, opened a portal to an alien dimension. In “Not in Portland,” (3.7) the episode directly prior to FBYE, the “Other” called Aldo is seen reading Stephen Hawking’s bestselling popular-level science book A Brief History of Time.[1] In FBYE, the mysterious female clerk in the jewelry shop who admonishes Desmond on the problems of changing history is named Ms. Hawking. It is worth noting that Stephen Hawking is known in scientific circles for, among other accomplishments, his groundbreaking work on black hole radiation, determining that wormholes require negative energy (such as that associated with the Casimir effect) to hold them open, and that the laws of physics seem to conspire at the quantum level to make time travel unlikely (the so-called Chronology Protection Conjecture). We will explore each of these fascinating scientific concepts on our journey through this chapter.

Given these numerous references within the text of the series, it is understandable that fans have often suggested explanations that invoke time travel and/or parallel universes in response to the numerous mysteries and seeming clues peppering the landscape of Lost. For example, O’Conner and Stewart (2006: 97) ask “Is it possible that the plane flew through a rip in the space/time continuum? Perhaps the survivors aren’t on earth at all, but in an alternate reality.” Starr (2006: 32) ponders if “They could be caught in a parallel universe, a recurring time loop, a limbo-place between times….” As we noted in the Introduction, the writers and producers have repeatedly offered that a rational scientific (or science fiction) explanation can be had for the mysteries of the island. Our mission, it seems, is to follow the clues to wherever they may lead. What crumbs have The Powers That Be given us with regards to FBYE? In a podcast posted on February 20, 2007 on the official ABC website, executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse made the following salient observations:

Viewers (and characters within the show) were witness to strange events associated with Desmond’s turning of the failsafe key, including the implosion of the hatch, a thrumming “blender sound,” and the sky turning a pale purple.[2] Although Hurley might take this as a clue to “make a salad a move on,” we will be so bold as to follow the crumbs through Einstein’s playground – the very fabric of space-time itself.

The basis for any serious scientific discussion of time travel or alternate dimensions is the work of Albert Einstein. Despite the fact that his most famous work is commonly lumped together in popular culture as a “theory of relativity,” there are actually two separate theories. In his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, which dealt with the laws of physics for observers moving at constant speeds relative to each other (hence the name relativity) he demonstrated that what we normally experience as the three dimensions of space (up/down, right/left, forward/back) and one of time are actually interwoven into a four-dimensional space-time. The theory is based on the basic principle that the speed of light is the universal speed limit, and faster-than-light travel is unattainable for physical objects in our universe, as it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a physical object to this speed (an inconvenience regularly and understandably ignored by science fiction writers for the sake of moving forward the plot). If one were to somehow travel faster than light, one would, indeed, travel backwards in time, as Superman did to save Lois Lane in Superman (1978).

Special relativity does, however, predict the possibility of time travel into the future for normal physical objects, including you and I. Because the speed of light is the same for all observers, measurements of time and space intervals are dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. For example, time passes much slower for an astronaut traveling close to the speed of light as measured by mission control back on earth. This is the basis for the famous twin paradox, where one twin sets off in a fast rocket for several decades of travel (as measured by the twin who remains on earth). When the twins are reunited, the earth-bound twin is significantly older than her space-traveling sibling. As strange as this “time dilation” seems, it has been experimentally verified in the cases of atomic clocks and elementary particles of normally extremely short lifetimes such as muons. Therefore, despite Donovan’s pronouncement in FBYE that “there’s no such thing as time travel, Des,” time travel (albeit in the future-directed sense) has most certainly been discovered.[3] In contrast, most discussions of past-directed time travel are derived from Einstein’s 1915 extension of relativity theory to accelerating frames of reference (including gravitational fields), known as the General Theory of Relativity (GTR).

There is an old joke that only three people in the world understand General Relativity, including Einstein himself.[4] While General Relativity is based on rather complex mathematics, its fundamental concepts and consequences can be understood with the help of analogies. As with any analogies, we must take care not to take them too literally, for if we do, we risk being led to absurdities. With that caveat in mind, four-dimensional space-time can be pictured as a flexible fabric made of three dimensions of space and one of time, interwoven in a very specific way that can be described mathematically by the Einstein field equations. The various ways that this fabric can be stretched and warped correspond to different mathematical solutions of this set of equations. Like any equations, there are two sides of the field equations that are set equal to each other. One side contains information on the energy and mass in that region of space-time. The other side of the equations contains information on the geometry of that space-time – how it is deformed by the presence of that mass and energy. Therefore these equations relate the shape of space-time to the amount and distribution of matter and energy present in the model.

A helpful two-dimensional analogy is a rubber sheet. When a heavy object, such a bowling ball, is placed into the center of the sheet, it bends or deforms in a particular way in response to the size, shape, and mass of the ball. Similarly, the presence of the sun deforms the “fabric” of the solar system, the resulting shape determining the orbits of the planets. In fact, the observed peculiar wobble of Mercury’s orbit caused by the sun’s distinctive distortion of space-time (known as the precession of the perihelion) was one of the three experimental tests of General Relativity suggested by Einstein. In an often-quoted (and seemingly Zen) description of the Einstein field equations by physicist J.A. Wheeler, “Matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move.” Interestingly, one of the other three classical tests involves a sort of time travel as well. Just as time passes more slowly for a fast-moving observer as compared to a stationary observer, so too time passes more slowly in the presence of a strong gravitational field as compared to an observer not under such circumstances. Experiments have shown that an atomic clock placed in the basement of a tall building will run slightly slower than an initially synchronized clock placed on the top floor (Pound and Rebka 1959), as the former experiences a stronger gravitational “pull” than the latter.

According to the limitations of the speed of light, all physical objects must take what are called timelike paths or curves through space-time. Light, which obviously travels at the speed of light, follows null curves, and a hypothetical situation where an object travels faster than light would follow a spacelike curve. But if the presence of matter (and energy) can warp space-time, is it possible to warp it in just the right way as to permit a material object to travel backwards in time without violating the prohibition of faster-than-light travel? Fortunately for science fiction writers (and time travelers) it is possible to find solutions of the Einstein field equations that contain closed timelike curves (CTCs)[5] in which a particle travels slower than light but returns to its starting point in time over and over again. These are therefore loops in time, or time loops, and make travel back in time at least theoretically possible. For example, in 1949 Kurt Gödel (best known for his incompleteness theorem of mathematics) discovered a solution to the Einstein field equations which described a universe filled with rotating matter. This model had CTCs associated with every point in space. Fortunately for those who doubted the possibility of time travel, the Gödel universe did not seem to have much in common with the universe in which we actually live, making it a mathematical curiosity and not much else.

It did, however, make some scientists begin to ponder the implications of the possibility of the existence of CTCs, including some serious paradoxes. Take, for example, the so-called Grandfather paradox. A time traveler could theoretically travel back in time and either kill her grandfather or otherwise prevent her grandparents from marrying before her father or mother were conceived, meaning that she would never have been born. But how, then, could she be there to prevent the marriage in the first place? In their seminal work The Large Scale Structure of Space-time, Stephen Hawking[6] and George Ellis (1973: 189) addressed the paradox as follows:

Of course, there is a contradiction only if one assumes a simple notion of free will; but this is not something which can be dropped lightly since the whole of our philosophy of science is based on the assumption that one is free to perform an experiment. It might be possible to form a theory in which there were closed timelike curves and in which the concept of free will was modified, but one would be much more ready to believe that space-time satisfies what we shall call the chronology condition: namely, that there are no closed timelike curves.

Scientists might have issues with the paradoxes of changing the past, but science fiction writers have embraced the possibility with open arms. Take, for example, the hit tv series Quantum Leap. Viewers watched Dr. Sam Beckett “leap” from time to time, temporarily inhabiting the body of another person as he purposefully sets out to change events (always for the better, of course). The recent family film The Last Mimzy (very loosely based on the short story “Mimsy Were the Borograves”) featured a dying humanity’s desperate attempt to save the future by sending machines disguised as toys into the past in order to collect a sample of pure DNA. The last of the mimzies (an artificial life form in the shape of an adorable toy rabbit[7]) succeeds in her mission, and carries her precious cargo of a little girl’s heart-felt tear back to the future, where the genetic damage wrought by humanity’s own abuse of the planet is undone.

Although time travel is possible in theory, is it possible to actually construct a time machine that can be utilized by human explorers? Research on practical time travel surprisingly owes its genesis to science fiction. While writing his novel Contact, Carl Sagan sent the manuscript to a friend, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, in 1985. Unlike many science fiction authors, he was worried that his physics wasn’t quite right and wanted an informed second opinion. As in many science fiction tales, the plot point was to get the heroine, radio astronomer Eleanor Arroway, from earth to a distant location (in this case, the star Vega, and beyond) faster than the speed of light would allow. After some thought, Thorne suggested a wormhole (a shortcut in space-time – a tunnel connecting two universes or two points in the same universe), even though he had doubts as to whether a real wormhole could exist as a practical tunnel in space-time.[8] Wormhole solutions to the Einstein field equations had been found shortly after the publication of GTR, but were largely ignored until the 1950s (as was the case of black holes) when they were studied by famed relativist John Archibald Wheeler and his colleagues. However, these wormhole solutions had one very serious drawback for someone considering using them as an interstellar subway system – they would pinch off nearly as soon as they formed, possibly while the unsuspecting traveler was passing through! This problem certainly did not prevent the writers of the tv series Babylon 5 from using multiple wormholes as an interstellar system of travel. Intrigued by the possibility of finding a wormhole solution that was truly traversable, Thorne and his graduate students began pondering the reality of wormholes, and initiated serious research on the topic. Their fascination was partially due to the fact that wormholes, if they existed, could allow travel in time as well as in space. Under the right conditions, a wormhole might allow a traveler to return to her starting point before she left, and paradoxically, somehow change history.

There was one quite significant problem to using a wormhole as a time machine, namely the unlikelihood of a wormhole (especially one large enough to be traversable) existing in the first place. The quandary is that in order to stabilize the wormhole – i.e. keep the “throat” of the wormhole open long enough for one to travel through it -- Hawking demonstrated that it is necessary to thread it with “exotic matter” – matter which has a negative energy density. Although “negative energy” might seem like an oxymoron, it actually follows directly from the predictions of 100-year-old physics. According to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, mass can be converted into energy (such as in an atomic bomb) and energy can be converted into mass (specifically a pair of massive objects, one being made of matter and the other its antimatter “mirror-image,” or antiparticle). Now consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, one of the most startling predictions of quantum mechanics. It also predicts that it is possible to create energy out of “nothing” so long as the energy debt is paid back in a very short period of time. This is similar to a bank loan, except that there is no interest, but the due date is absolute! This energy is, in a sense, borrowed from the very fabric of the universe – from the “vacuum” as it is called. These vacuum fluctuations occur randomly every second of every day, with the borrowed energy creating a particle-antiparticle pair (called a “virtual pair”, since they only enjoy temporary existence). After the passage of a tiny amount of time, the pair rejoins and annihilates, repaying the energy debt to the universe. This frenetic borrowing and repaying (somewhat reminiscent of the New York Stock Exchange, if you think about it) is what drives the vacuum fluctuations.

Anther way of thinking about this vacuum energy is to look at another of the predictions of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In the everyday world, I can observe and define the position and speed of a moving object like a car or a baseball equally precisely (to within the limits of my measuring tools). Shrinking ourselves down to the realm of the atom, and this is no longer possible. If you try to pinpoint the position of an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom, it becomes increasingly difficult to define its motion, and vice versa. There is always some built in unpredictability. It is interesting to note that in FBYE just before Desmond asks his physicist friend Donovan about time travel, the professor is discussing the effect of unpredictability (one presumes in relation to quantum mechanics) on experiments and observations with a student. Therefore, it is impossible for an electron to actually stop, as we would know its position precisely, in violation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If we could cool down matter to absolute zero (or zero degrees Kelvin), there would still remain some random motion or jiggling. It is as if the very fabric of the universe suffers from a chronic case of the fidgets! Because of this inability to reach zero motion at zero degrees, the energy associated with the vacuum fluctuations is sometimes called the zero point energy (ZPE). Its sum across the entire universe is enormous, but in any given area is small indeed. If we try to squeeze out the ZPE contained in a volume the size of the earth, we would only derive the equivalent energy in a single gallon of gas (Gardner 1998: 15). Unfortunately, as we shall see in a later chapter, there is great misunderstanding concerning this energy, and some have even assigned some strange mystical quality to it, when it is merely a basic property of the fabric of the universe that is normally unseen by our crude, macroscopic eyes. Indeed, individual fluctuations normally last about one billion trillionth of a second, and virtual particle and antiparticle normally achieve a separation no greater than about one hundredth the size of a single atom. How could it be experimentally possible to observe such a miniscule reaction?

The key is to look for the effects of large numbers of vacuum fluctuations rather than to try to directly observe any fluctuation directly. For example, electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations like those described above play an important role in the workings of fluorescent lights. Electricity flows into the base of the bulb, creating an electric spark that excites the mercury vapor atoms in the tube (i.e. it moves electrons into higher energy orbits around the atomic nucleus than they would normally inhabit). Now the vacuum fluctuations take over, randomly stimulating individual electrons to give up their excitement energy as light waves. Vacuum fluctuations also cause very small but measurable changes in the frequency of light emitted by excited atoms, called the Lamb Effect (whose discovery garnered physicist Willis Lamb the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics). Virtual particles are also responsible for a pervasive low-level noise in electronic equipment. Technically any particle-antiparticle virtual pair could be created, although electrons and positrons are the most common. Could a rabbit-antirabbit pair be created, under the right circumstances?

At Comic Con 2007 in San Diego, Lost producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof premiered a new D.H.A.R.M.A. Initiative video, for the Orchid Station, featuring our old friend Dr. Candle/Wickmund (now called Hallowax) and lab rabbit # 15. Its true purpose was revealed to be anything other than botanical, being rather the exploration of the strange “kind of Casimir Effect,” a “highly volatile and potentially dangerous” field generated by the Island.[9] Without warning, an exact copy of rabbit 15 appeared out of nowhere, and chaos ensued, with Hallowax shouting “Don’t let them near each other!” Are we to assume that somehow an anti-rabbit 15 has just been created, and Hallowax is afraid they will annihilate each other in a lethal and destructive shower of gamma rays if allowed to come into contact? Possibly, but since one assumes rabbit 15 is a “real” rabbit, a vacuum effect would most likely create a new rabbit/antirabbit pair, not just a new antirabbit (although the energy required to create something the mass of a rabbit is far beyond any normal vacuum fluctuation!). More likely is that rabbit 15 accomplished time travel, from 9 minutes into the future, as referenced in the following exchange from the video:

This, of course, begs the question, what is the Casimir Effect, and what does it have to do with time travel?

In 1948, Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that if two parallel conducting metal plates were brought very close to one another vacuum fluctuations between the plates would cause a very slight attraction force. Experiments have since verified his calculations. But the creation of a particle-antiparticle pair can also be equivalently described as a single particle moving in a closed timelike loop (forward and backward in time). This CTC is made possible by the negative energy density produced between the plates (hence the attractive force, as a positive energy density would repel the plates away from each other). Therefore, a controlled Casimir experiment, if large enough, could in theory produce enough negative energy to stabilize a wormhole and initiate time travel. Possible, but highly unlikely, since the Casimir forces are excruciatingly tiny (generating a hundred millionth of an earth’s atmosphere in pressure if two plates are held just a thousandth of a millimeter apart). But this is where we must allow the writers of Lost the freedom to move from science to science fiction without reproach.[10]

There is another fascinating (and possible relevant) way in which vacuum energy fluctuations affect macroscopic objects, namely black holes. In 1974, Stephen Hawking made his most famous theoretical discovery when he studied the possibility the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs just outside the event horizon of a black hole (the “boundary” which marks the zone around a black hole from which any swallowed object cannot return because in order to do so it would have to travel faster than light). He found that if one of the members of the pair falls into the black hole, the remaining particle cannot annihilate with its partner when their time is up, and the energy debt appears to be unpaid. Therefore, he found that a “real” particle or antiparticle has to be created seemingly from nothing, or, rather, looks to an outside observer as if it leaked from inside the black hole. But the energy needed to create the particle has to come from somewhere – namely from the black hole itself. In this way, the energy of the black hole, or, better yet, its mass (since mass and energy are convertible), decreases, and the black hole “radiates away” through this so-called Hawking radiation due to a negative energy flow into the black hole. In “Not in Portland” (3.7), Aldo is seen reading the chapter of A Brief History of Time in which Hawking describes these results. It has been suggested that perhaps a wormhole could be carefully positioned with one of its mouths just outside the event horizon of a black hole in order to exploit the negative energy in keeping the wormhole stabilized. Not an experiment I would volunteer for, even if it were possible!

Negative energy can theoretically be created in situations other than the neighborhood of a black hole or between closely spaced metal plates. For example, physicists Paul Davies and Stephen Fulling demonstrated in 1977 that a mirror moving near the speed of light creates negative energy in front of it as it moves. However, accelerating a mirror to near the speed of light requires a sizeable amount of energy, and the amount of negative energy obtained is disappointingly small. In contrast, it would take an amount of negative energy equivalent to the total energy output of the sun during its ten billion year lifespan to hold open a meter-wide wormhole. Despite the numerous ways that negative energy can be created, none appear to be technologically feasible to stabilize a traversable wormhole (given our present understanding, at least).

Not only is it frustratingly difficult to construct and maintain a wormhole, but it appears the laws of physics may actually conspire against it! Calculations by Kip Thorne and his collaborators suggest that vacuum fluctuations may actually destroy a wormhole as soon as it is formed. Stephen Hawking and Michael Cassidy calculated that the probability of a wormhole escaping from vacuum fluctuation suicide at a paltry 1 chance in 10⁶⁰! For this reason, Hawking postulated the Chronology Protection Conjecture, which states that “the laws of physics do not allow the appearance of closed timelike curves.” He added the humorous comment that “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians” (Hawking 1992: 603).

The issue of closed timelike curves is not closed, however (pun very much intended). More recent calculations have shown that perhaps quantum effects do not necessarily destroy wormholes (and other time machines). Part of the problem in understanding whether or not the laws of physics conspire at a quantum level to prevent the formation of CTCs is that we do not yet have a complete, consistent theory which combines general relativity and quantum mechanics, or as it is called quantum gravity. This is a significant problem in all areas of research at the interface between cosmology and particle physics, such as questions of the origin and early state of the universe. This unexpected union of the largest and smallest scales of the universe (and the importance of gravity at both) was first symbolized by the ancient archetype of the ouroboros (a snake eating its tail) by Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow (Ferris 1982, 38). This same symbol appears in FBYE as the broach Ms. Hawking wears. It is not unreasonable to draw further connections between the ouroboros and CTCs (as time loops), as well as remind the reader that the wedding ring (featured in FBYE) itself is also a symbol of the connectivity of reality and the eternal, and as such forms a continuous loop.

Wormholes are not the only proposed scientific models for time machines. All that one needs to do is to warp space-time in just the right way as to generate CTCs. An example from science fiction is the vaguely-described “tesseract” used in A Wrinkle in Time (a book on Sawyer’s reading list in Season 1)[11]. Readers are told that by using the fifth dimension one can travel a shorter distance and either forward or backward (in both space and time) than going across normal four-dimensional space-time. How Mrs. Who, Which, and Whatsit (and Dr. Murry for that matter) manage to accomplish this warping of space-time is conveniently never mentioned. In the real world, researchers were excited for a time about the possibility of using moving pairs of cosmic strings to generate CTCs and therefore the possibility of time travel. Cosmic strings are extremely massive (having a density of 10¹⁵ tons per inch), 1-dimensional hypothetical “snags” in the fabric of space-time which are thought to come in two flavors: extremely long and closed loops. It was pairs of the latter which were initially thought to create CTCs. However, further research threw this into doubt.[12] Was it not possible to generate usable CTCs in the laboratory after all?

On May 22, 1955, electronics whiz and television repairman to the stars Boyd Mallett suddenly died of a heart attack. He was only 33 years old. His ten year old son, Ronald, the eldest of four children, was devastated. Two summers later, Ron and his family left their Bronx home for his grandparents’ hometown of Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he made two discoveries which would impact the rest of his life – racism, and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The former would be a continual source of frustration, but the latter gave him hope in a time of despair – if he could learn enough science, he thought, he could build a time machine and save his father from an untimely death. It was this hope that propelled Ron through physics degrees at Penn State University, culminating in a Ph.D. in general relativity and a position of Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut, where, as you learned in Chapter 1, I had the great fortune having Ron as my Ph.D. thesis advisor.

Recall that in order to make a time machine, one needs to bend space-time in such a way as to make CTCs. Also remember that according to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, matter AND energy warp space-time. One of Ron’s crowning accomplishments in theoretical physics was his finding that a circulating beam of light, (such as a ring laser) will theoretically warp space-time in just such as way as to create CTCs. It is seriously possible that this model could be used (given the proper laser technology) to construct a workable time machine, and very preliminary experiments are in the planning stages.[13] . Although the necessary technology for a viable time machine is at least a decade away, it is clear that we should not assume that time machines are impossible. Take, for the example, the 1895 comment by the President of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin, (another gratuitous Lost reference perhaps?) who proclaimed that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” Eight years later, the Wright Brothers proved him wrong.

One argument that has sometimes been used against the possibility of backward-directed time travel is that we have not yet been visited by any travelers from the future. However it can be shown that no time machine can be used to visit a time prior to when it was switched on. Therefore, until we succeed in building a time machine (and leave it running for some length of time), visitors from the future will only exist in the world of science fiction. Unfortunately, this also means that Ron Mallett will never be able to travel back in time and warn his father of his impending doom.

But assuming that a time machine can and will be successfully built, and will not be destroyed by quantum fluctuations or any other unforeseen physical effects, what are we to make of the very real paradoxes time travel poses, such as the Grandfather paradox described earlier?

Hawking (1996) offered two possible resolutions to these paradoxes, which he called the “consistent histories” and “alternative histories” approaches[14]. The first solution demands that the laws of physics are constrained such that paradoxes cannot arise. For example, if you try to go into the past and kill your grandfather before your parents are conceived, the gun will jam, or you will slip and fall and miss the shot. In technical terminology, one must impose “consistency constraints on the allowable initial conditions on spacelike surfaces prior to the formation of the CTCs, thus abandoning the principle that initial conditions on such surfaces can be chosen at will” (Everett 2004, 124023-1). Or, as Hawking (1996) succinctly puts it, “So much for free will.” You might intend to change the future, and believe that you actually have the free will to do so, but in the end you will always do exactly what you were destined to do, acting in such a manner as to keep events historically consistent. It is as a jilted Penny admonished Desmond in FBYE, “Don’t you rewrite history!”

Therefore, central to this discussion of paradoxes and time travel is the issue of freewill versus determinism, another ongoing theme in Lost. Do we have carte blanche to do anything we please, or is our life predetermined from before our birth? In Lost, numerous characters utter the phrase “don’t tell me what to do,” and appear to make active choices. For example, Jack chooses to save Boone and not Joanna from the riptide in “White Rabbit” (1.5) and to try to save Sarah, his future wife, rather than Shannon’s father, even though they were both in the same car accident (“Man of Science, Man of Faith” 2.1). , and Locke makes Charlie ask for his heroin three times in “The Moth” (1.7) because “having choices based on more than instinct is the only thing that separates us from [a wild boar].” In that episode’s flashback, Charlie’s priest reminds him that life is nothing more than a series of choices. When Sayid prevents Shannon from shooting Locke in retribution for Boone’s death, he explains to Kate that “there’s always a choice” (“The Greater Good” 1.12). On the other hand, Jack’s father Christian always laid the blame for his foibles on fate (“Outlaws” 1.16), while Locke explained to Jack that he believed in destiny, he just wasn’t aware of that fact yet (“Exodus Part 2” 1.24). Sun and Shannon voice the tension between these opposing points of view in the same episode, where Sun asks if their experiences were the result of their being punished for their past misdeeds by fate. Shannon’s response is that there is no such thing as fate. If the consistent histories approach to time travel is being played out on the Island, all the characters’ seemingly free choices are therefore called into question. Freewill becomes more of an illusion than a reality. The extent to which freewill depends on outside causes and conditions was discussed by philosopher David Hume[15] (after whom Desmond David Hume is apparently named). Ayer (1980: 76-7) summarizes Hume’s argument as follows:

No one seriously believes in the freedom of the will, if this is taken to imply that men’s actions are uncaused. He admits that when it comes to one’s own actions one has a tendency to claim this type of freedom. “We feel, that our actions are subject to our will, on most occasions; and imagine that our will itself is subject to nothing”, partly because we do not suffer from any feeling of constraint. We may be ignorant of all the regularities to which we conform, and even when we discover them we may still fancy that we can elude their grasp. We may even prove this to our own satisfaction by choosing a different course of action in what we take to be the same circumstances, not seeing that there is a decisive difference in that “the fantastical desire of shewing [sic] liberty is now itself operating as a cause.”

Hume’s arguments, and a general discussion of the importance of freewill, are part of the standard Western canon. We even find it at the heart of A Wrinkle in Time, where a symptom of the hold the evil IT has over Camazotz is the absolute determinism of the citizens’ lives. As Mrs. Whatsit reminds us, “if we knew ahead of time what was going to happen we’d be – we’d be like the people on Camazotz, with no lives of our own, with everything all planned and done for us” (L’Engle 2007: 218). In stark contrast, we find in Eastern traditions the concept of karma, which phrases the question in terms of choice-driven cause and the resulting inescapable effect. From the 108 beads on the traditional mala, to the name D.H.A.R.M.A. and several visual images of the Buddha, numerous references to Buddhism appear throughout Lost’s canon. Karma (usually translated as “action”) is central to Buddhist belief. As a direct result of one’s actions of body, speech, and mind, one accumulates positive and negative karma throughout one’s innumerable lifetimes (rebirths). As various seeds of karma ripen, they cause the trials and tribulations of one’s current existence, from the realm of one’s current rebirth (hell being, hungry ghost, animal, human, demigod, or god), to one’s physical appearance, health, and fortune. The power of karma is demonstrated most vividly in the often-repeated story of Mala Mogallana, one of the Buddha’s original disciples. It is said that when the Buddha’s homeland was invaded by a neighboring king, the Buddha did not intervene, understanding that the wholesale destruction of his kinsmen was the result of the ripening of their accumulated karma. Mogallana, who possessed significant supernatural powers, decided to save 500 members of the Buddha’s clan by collecting them in a bowl and removing them from the battlefield. A safe distance away, Mogallana opened the bowl and found that those he had attempted to save were already dead – their karma was to die in the war, and nothing could circumvent their fate. To quote the mysterious Ms. Hawking of FBYE, the Sakya clan were like the man with the red shoes: “The universe unfortunately has a way of course correcting. That man was supposed to die. That was his path.”

Thus Desmond’s actions in jilting Penny in FBYE appear to mirror the consistent histories approach to time travel, Hume’s philosophy of the limits of freewill, and the law of karma in Buddhism. Although he initially threatened to create a paradox by taking the ring from the shop, and actively affirmed his belief in his own freewill, in the end he merely did what he was supposed to do all along – break Penny’s heart. Another example in the same episode occurs when Desmond realizes that his recollection of the end of the soccer game was a day off. He exclaims, “I can still change things”, but before he can rush off to see Penny he encounters his friend with the cricket bat and is hit in the head, which sends him back to the island and apparently prevents him from changing history. However, as Lindelof and Cuse remind us in their podcast, Desmond has indeed changed history, as the bat attack was meant for the bartender, not Desmond, which will have “future ramifications.” The ability to change history by time travel leads us to consider a different possibility, namely alternative histories and the existence of “parallel universes.”

The alternative histories explanation of time travel is based on an alternative to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, called the Many Worlds Interpretation or MWI (Everett III 1957). In this model, every time an experiment with several possible outcomes is conducted, the universe “branches” into parallel realities, one for each of the possible outcomes. Therefore, anything that can happen, does happen! In one universe, a copy of you stopped reading this book after the first chapter, in another a copy of you stopped reading after the second chapter, and in yet another, a copy of you decided not to read the book at all. There are also parallel universes where you never watched a single episode of Lost, or decided after viewing it once or twice to never watch it again. Reality with a capital R is the sum of all possible parallel realities or universes, sometimes called the multiverse[16]. Which one of you is the real you? All of you are just as real, in your own particular universe. What’s more, in its original form, the MWI predicts that since there is no effect of one reality on another, there is no way one observer can ever be aware of the splitting process. Although there would be universes where Desmond did turn the key as well as those where he did not (presumably those in which he married Penny), perhaps it is true that for some reason in those universes where he did not turn the key, the result would indeed be exactly what Ms. Hawking warned, a future where “Every single one of us is dead.”

But as physicist David Deutsch explains, it is actually more complicated than this. In fact, he has demonstrated that in a modification of the MWI it is possible for the various parallel universes to interact, and in fact it is the existence of this infinite multiplicity of parallel universes, each with its own unique timeline, that allows time travel into the past without relinquishing freewill or causing paradoxes. A time traveler who succeeds in going back in time and killing her grandfather before her parent’s conception is doing so in a universe in which she will never be born. She can presumably return to her own universe, but in that universe her grandparents lived to successfully reproduce and she was eventually born. Freewill is conserved, but no paradox results. As Deutsch (1997, 309) remarks, time travel between parallel realities in the MWI

Allows us to make the past different from the way we remember it (in this universe…. Changing the past means choosing which past snapshot to be in, not changing any particular past snapshot into another. In this respect, changing the past is no different from changing the future, which we do all the time. Whenever we make a choice, we change the future: we change it from what it would have been had we chosen differently.

In other words, it is precisely as Locke (and the flashback priest) told Charlie in “The Moth” – life (and the very nature of reality) is a series of choices. The example of a snapshot is interesting, as Lindelof and Cuse pointed out in their podcast that in the reality Desmond experienced after turning the key there was a single copy of the photograph of he and Penny, while in another timeline there are apparently two (one in the possession of Penny).

The idea of traveling between parallel realities or universes has been used in numerous works of science fiction. Take, for example, the tv series Sliders. Genius physicist Quinn Mallory accidentally creates a machine that opens doorways between alternate realities while attempting to create an anti-gravity device. Mallory and his friends afterwards “slide” between these different realities, each somehow different from the reality from which they originated. In the 2001 cult movie Donnie Darko, an unstable tangent universe suddenly opens up in the nick of time to save the title character from certain death when an airplane engine falls on his house. But as Donnie finds out, through reading a mysterious book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, he must go back to the primary universe and die in the original accident in order to save the primary world[17]. Lost itself paid at least lip service to this theory near the end of Season 3, with Naomi’s assertion that the wreckage of Oceanic 815 was found at the bottom of the ocean, with all bodies still inside. In Naomi’s original reality (if we take her word at face value), the Losties are dead, and the surviving members of Driveshaft are cashing in on a new album at Charlie’s expense. But on the Island, the survivors of Oceanic 815 are clearly that (and at least two of them remain so in some parallel future, if the finale of Season 3 is to be trusted).

As appealing as the MWI/parallel universe approach is for those interested in time travel, a paper by Allen Everett (2004, 124023-3) has cast some doubt on Deutsch’s analysis, at least as applied to wormholes. His work suggests that although a microscopic object could successfully navigate between two parallel histories using a wormhole, for a macroscopic object (such as a person), the end result would be less than appealing:

One finds no self-consistent solutions in which the object passes intact through the wormhole exist…. The object is sliced into two, or generally many, pieces in passing through the wormhole, with different pieces winding up in different worlds.

Certainly yet another experiment I would advise not volunteering for! Is time travel then inherently dangerous? This question brings us to perhaps the most infamous “experiment” of the twentieth century, and further considerations of the risks we take when messing with Father Time.

The Swan Station “Incident”, Timeline, and the Philadelphia Experiment: The Dangers of Time Travel

Highly speculative (and largely incorrect) applications of time travel can certainly be found in Lost fan discussions. Many relate to the obvious magnetic anomaly of the island, associated most directly with the D.H.A.R.M.A. Initiative’s interest in electromagnetic research and the mysterious “incident” that occurred at the Swan Station, which subsequently necessitated discharging magnetic energy every 108 minutes. As we have seen, electromagnetic energy (in the form of a ring laser) has been shown in theory to lead to CTCs and therefore has the potential to create backwards directed time travel. Far less scientific is the connection some fans have drawn between the electromagnetic research of the D.H.A.R.M.A. Initiative and the so-called Philadelphia Experiment. This is alleged to have been a secret Navy experiment called Project Rainbow conducted by a Dr. Franklin Reno on October 28, 1943, in which a failed attempt to dematerialize and teleport the U.S.S. Eldridge from Philadelphia to Norfolk supposedly resulted in horrific and deadly side effects on the crew (including invisibility and insanity, and, in the most dramatic versions of this urban legend, missing body parts and the partial melding of crew members’ bodies with the ship itself).

The Philadelphia Experiment has been demonstrated to have been a hoax perpetrated by Carl Allen in 1956, based on a series of letters Allen wrote to amateur astronomer and UFOlogist Morris K. Jessup (Carroll 2006). In his letters, Allen alleged to have direct knowledge of the elicit experiment, done as a supposed test of Einstein’s unified field theory. This refers to Einstein’s unsuccessful twenty five year quest to find a consistent and complete unification of the electromagnetic force with gravitation. What is interesting (and perhaps relevant here) is that the Navy was certainly experimenting with magnetic “invisibility” in 1943, hoping to make ships “invisible to magnetic torpedoes by deGaussing them” (Carroll 2006). Are we to assume that the infamous “incident” at the Swan Station was an experiment to make the island “invisible”, or is it really meant to be a more science fiction event (like the Philadelphia experiment hoax)? The fact that the Swan Station apparently needed to be deGaussed every 108 minutes after the “incident” is certainly food for thought.

The idea that time travel can lead to physical harm is also central to Michael Crichton’s novel Timeline. Here, “CTC technology” uses quantum computers to transmit an electron stream carrying the “instructions” for reconstituting a human being through a wormhole in order to accomplish time travel. The characters are “deconstructed” (essentially converted into an electron stream as they are shrunk to microscopic size) and enter a microscopic wormhole through which they travel into a parallel universe. In this case, vacuum fluctuations of the gravitational force rather than electromagnetic force are drawn upon. In 1955, Princeton’s John Archibald Wheeler found that at the tiniest sizes imaginable, the very fabric of space-time is a seething quantum foam of gravitational vacuum fluctuations. Wormholes could naturally be created and then destroyed as part of these fluctuations. If it were possible to grab one of these microscopic wormholes, enlarge it to macroscopic size, and stabilize it, well, you can figure out what we could do with it. Crichton sidesteps these last technological difficulties and instead has his characters shrink to the size of the quantum foam itself.

However, this method of time travel appears to have rather nasty side effects. As the travelers are deconstructed and reconstructed, tiny “transcription errors” creep in, which accumulate over time and can eventually lead to a rather gruesome death. One character who accumulated too many errors died when his circulatory system became so “offset” that the walls of the chambers of his heart failed to line up and a lack of circulation in his fingertips resulted in gangrene. A now hideously deformed cat involved in early versions of the time travel technology served as a warning to the archaeologists attempting to rescue their colleague who had become trapped in the Middle Ages. A similarly ominous warning appears in A Wrinkle In Time, when Dr. Murry explains that when he allowed himself to be used as a guinea pig for the tesseract project “we had no idea whether it would really work or whether it would be complete bodily disintegration. Playing with time and space is a dangerous game” (2007: 184). What warning should the Losties (and their fans) draw from these literary precedents? Before moving to the next topic, I will point out the following obvious parallels between Lost and Timeline:

· Both feature female characters named Kate and Claire (in the case of Timeline, an architecture historian and a lady of the court in the Middle Ages respectively).

· Both have a location named Black Rock (in Timeline, the location of the main time travel facility)

This last connection should be discussed in some detail. In the Season 2 finale “Live Together, Die Alone,” Jin, Sun, and Sayid sail along the coast of the Island and pass by a mysterious stone statue of an ankle and sandal-clad foot having only four toes. In Timeline, the key to the secret passage under the castle was found by searching in the Green Chapel for the “feet of the giant.” In this case, the doorway of the chapel was carved into the shape of two huge feet, but was so eroded as to not be immediately recognizable as such. Did the statue on the Island once possess the proper number of toes, or is it a warning about the deleterious physical effects of playing with time? Don’t look to me for answers on this one….

Returning to the Swan Station and its mysterious “incident,” more speculative still is the possibility that the Swan Station research into electromagnetism was meant to create a gateway for the purpose of “escaping” into another universe – or even creating another universe to escape to -- to avoid the destruction of the human race (if research into changing the parameters of the apocalypse-predicting Valenzetti Equation failed), similar to the plotline of Greg Bear’s novel Eon. Believe it or not, this fictional premise has a valid scientific precedent. In fact, our entire visible universe may have begun as a mere space-time fluctuation.

It is common knowledge that the current best scientific model for the early history of the universe is the so-called Big Bang, which (if you will allow me to over simplify it for the sake of brevity) states that the infant universe was in a very hot, dense state and has expanded and cooled over the past 14 or so billion years[18]. While the Big Bang has been corroborated by numerous observational tests, what most people don’t know is that it does not actually claim to tell us about the exact origin of the universe, but rather explains the evolution of the universe from that initial hot, dense state. In fact, the Big Bang, even when coupled with our best understanding of quantum mechanics and GTR, can tell us nothing of certainty about what happened before 10^-43 seconds after a presumed beginning. This is because we lack a complete understanding of how quantum mechanics and GTR should merge at these high energies and small distances. Be that as it may, this lack of a complete model of quantum gravity has not prevented physicists from developing possible scenarios for the origin of the universe. In 1973, Edward Tryon proposed the rather startling idea that the entire universe began as a vacuum fluctuation of space-time and grew to its present state long afterwards. As he somewhat flippantly put it, “our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time” (1973: 397). But how can you get something permanent (like a universe) out of a vacuum fluctuation? Wouldn’t the cosmic energy loan sharks have the mother of all conniption fits over this? The key is understanding that the overall energy of the universe is actually zero – the positive energy contained in all the mass in the universe is balanced by the energy stored in the gravitational field of the universe. It’s similar to a business where the balance sheet meets the accountant’s expectations because the business expenses perfectly matches the income received.

Tryon’s model was largely ignored by the scientific community, but not for the reasons you might expect. There was nothing wrong with his basic premise, but it left unanswered two important questions. Firstly, if the universe began as a vacuum fluctuation of space-time, then space-time had to exist in the first place, which really doesn’t answer the question about the origin of space and time. Second, even if the universe was in a rather small, hot dense, state in its first instant of existence, it would represent a vacuum fluctuation far larger than those normally considered. There was no physical reason why one that large couldn’t be produced, it just seemed highly unlikely.[19] Later theories conveniently solved both problems.

In 1981, particle physicist Alan Guth (now at M.I.T.) was researching the properties of the early universe, about 10^-35 seconds after its beginning when it had cooled to a temperature of about 10²⁷ Kelvin. He found that it was possible that the universe supercooled at this point, failing to make an important transition where there were two fundamental forces in nature to three. A similar process can occur when water is cooled below its freezing point yet remains liquid, as in the case of freezing rain. This is termed supercooling. The result is a temporary repulsive force, like an antigravity, which would inflate the infant universe exponentially, growing 10²⁵ times bigger in the blink of an eye. Eventually the universe “remembers” to make the required transition (just as supercooled watcher eventually freezes), and inflation ends, the universe then resuming the evolution predicted by the usual Big Bang model. As strange as this model seems, it actually makes predictions concerning the leftover radiation from the early universe (called the cosmic background radiation) and the overall structure of space-time which agree with current best observations.[20]

If inflation occurred, then the infant universe could be far tinier than originally thought, making its origin from a vacuum fluctuation less of a stretch (pun intended). But this still did not overcome the fundamental question of the origin of space-time itself. In 1982, Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University proposed that the entire universe began through the quantum mechanical process known as tunneling, making a sudden change from one state to another. In this instance, the initial state was nothing in its truest sense (no space, no time) and the final state was something in its ultimate sense – a universe in space-time. Again, as counterintuitive as this may seem, it does not violate any laws of nature since the overall energy balance of the universe is zero – it is, as Alan Guth likes to call it, the ultimate free lunch.

Modern improvements to the inflationary model make more startling predictions still. It is now believed that once inflation begins, it will never end, a concept called eternal inflation. The inflationary era was originally expected to end because the false vacuum is inherently unstable and decays, similar to a radioactive isotope. Like the decay of uranium or plutonium, the rate of decay of the false vacuum is mathematically exponential, but recall that the rate of expansion during the inflationary era is also exponential. It turns out that in most models the rate of inflationary expansion is significantly faster than the decay of the false vacuum, with the overall effect that the false vacuum actually gets bigger, not smaller, with time! Individual “pockets” of the false vacuum will decay at different times, each leading to a separate universe, dubbed pocket universes. The collection of all pocket universes that derive from the original false vacuum is sometimes called the multiverse (not to be confused with the multiverse of the Many Worlds Interpretation). According to eternal inflation, at all moments, some pocket universe is being created by undergoing inflation, and once formed it evolves independently of all its sibling universes. For example, our pocket universe began about 14 billion years ago in an inflationary era we generically call our “big bang,” and as far as we know our universe will continue to exist (albeit becoming a darker and lonelier place) for an infinite period of time. Does this mean that inflation has always occurred somewhere in our multiverse? Has a discussion of the ultimate origin of the universe really been avoided? It appears that, at least in simple inflation models, there is still a finite beginning somewhere in the distant past, and inflation is only eternal in the future direction.

Even if the universe we observe today were created in such a manner (and Mother Nature continues to give birth to child universes even today), what could this possible have to do with our existence on planet earth? Would we even dare to think that it might be possible to create our own false vacuum bubble in the laboratory, and hence our own nascent inflationary universe? In a word – yes. In a seminal 1987 paper, Alan Guth, Steven Blau and E.I Guendelman described the space-time structure of “child universes” – tiny pockets of space-time which inflate to the size of an entire universe. What is most fascinating is that this inflation is calculated to take place in another space-time, not our own, and that the gateway to this child universe appears as a black hole in our universe. While a companion paper by Guth and Ed Farhi showed that it may be technically unlikely to be able to create a child universe in a laboratory, this does not constrain science fiction writers from exploiting such a “what if” scenario. Is this what happened when the hatch imploded? As a possible response, let us entertain the highly speculative possibility of one further reference to actual scientific theory (and with it, one last gratuitous self reference). Ron Mallett and I attended a talk given by Ed Farhi at Yale in 1987 where he presented his and Guth’s research on child universes. By the end of the talk, Ron and I had decided on the topic for my Ph.D. thesis – I would try and figure out how one might distinguish a “normal” black hole from one attached to a child universe on the “other side.” After three years of work, what we found was that a black hole attached to a child universe can be distinguished from a “normal” black hole due to a distinctive change in the Hawking radiation emitted (until the “umbilical cord” is eventually cut with the child universe) (Larsen and Mallett 1991). Have the Losties entered a newly-created child universe as the direct result of the hatch’s implosion, with the strange effects experienced such as the “blender noise” and the sky turning purples symbolic of the child universe’s painful birth? As we slowly tip toe on to the next topic, I leave it to the reader to ascertain if I have stretched the thread of credibility at this point of the analysis to the breaking point.

One of the most obvious and long-lasting effects of Desmond’s “course correction” was his recurring flashes of apparent precognition, leading him to save Charlie’s life over and over again. For sake of this discussion, we consider them to be caused by his time/parallel universe traveling and not within the realm of parapsychology. The first obvious instance was in “Further Instructions” (3.3), when he casually mentions to Hurley a speech that Locke had not yet given. When the event actually occurs in their timeline, Hurley is stunned, and tells Charlie “I just got hit with, you know, déjà vu.”

Déjà vu – a French term meaning “seen already” – became part of the psychological vocabulary in the late 19th century. It refers to an uneasy, fleeting feeling that we have experienced something before even though we know the event is happening for the first time. Studies suggest that more than half of people surveyed can recall having experienced déjà vu at least once in their lives (Wolfradt 2005). The experience can seem so otherworldly and inexplicable that people are sometimes prone to chalk it up to a mystical or paranormal experience, perhaps even as evidence of reincarnation and past lives. On the contrary, déjà vu has been the subject of serious scientific inquiry, and some 40 theories have been proposed to explain it (Lazerson 1994: 285).

The most popular scientific explanation has been optical pathway delay. In this process, the images captured by one eye were received by the brain a few millionths of a second later than the images captured by the other eye, causing a sensation that the object was being viewed for the second time. In fact, this theory was the basis for the incidences of déjà vu in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. Not surprisingly, this novel appears in Lost in Season 3, but in Naomi’s pocket (in the episode of the same name) rather than Sawyer’s library stash. In late 2006, researchers at the University of Leeds reported episodes of déjà vu experienced by a blind man (triggered via touch, smell and hearing), casting serious doubt on the optical pathway delay theory.

A completely new explanation was announced in June 2007 by researchers at the Picowar Institute for Learning and Memory at M.I.T. The scientists used a genetically engineered mouse to study how a portion of the limbic system of the brain called the dentate gyrus[21] aids in the recognition of new versus previously experienced spaces (Halber 2007). When we encounter a space for the first time, special neurons called “place cells” send signals to the dentate gyrus, creating a neural sketch of the space. When we encounter the same space, the same neurons fire, letting us know we’ve been there before. This saves our brains the time and energy of relearning a space or situation we’ve already encountered. However if we encounter a situation that is very similar to something we’ve experienced before, our brain apparently fires a new but overlapping set of these place cells to make a new neural sketch. If there is too much overlap between the two sets of cells, this triggers an episode of déjà vu.

So déjà vu is possibly caused by our brain’s subtle confusion of different but similar spaces seen at different times. But what if we really did have that experience before, but in a parallel universe (as was the case of poor Desmond when he briefly returned to his past life with Penny in FBYE)? Such was the plotline of the 2006 film Déjà vu. In this science fiction movie ATF agent Doug Carlin utilized a secret government time travel project called Snow White to travel into the past to try and prevent the deaths of over 500 people in a bombing. He manages to change the past, but in order to prevent the bombing he must commit suicide by driving the truck bomb into the water. His love interest in the film, a woman who, in the original timeline, Carlin had never met and who died before the bombing, is saved, and when his present-day self pulls her from the water after the explosion, he experiences déjà vu: “You look familiar – have I seen you some place before?” Our “mutual friend” Desmond suffers this over and over again in Season 3, in a rather clever revision of Bill Murray’s fate in Groundhog Day. Will his flashes end with Charlie’s death at the end of Season 3? Or will the changes he made to his timeline when he traveled back in time continue to haunt him (and the other inhabitants of the Island) in Seasons 4, 5, and 6? To discuss these possibilities, we must…

The future need not be an undiscovered country. Through science and technology we can turn our inexorable forward motion into a safe journey into a well-charted haven of tranquility – Alvar Hanso[22]

We have carefully explored the science, pseudoscience, and philosophy behind time travel and its paradoxes in an effort to decode some of the many clues given to us by the creators of Lost. Since Lost is science fiction and not science fact, we cannot expect the writers to be exactly true to the science, but rather to the spirit of those particular bits of science which work to motivate the intended plotline. What we have, at the very least, is confirmation that despite the pronouncement of Stafford (2006, 331) that the phone call alerting Penny of the “anomaly” in “Live Together, Die Alone” “immediately destroys the purgatory/timewarp/aliens/alternative universe/nuclear holocaust theories”, at least two of these possibilities are most certainly still on the table for discussion. But in ascribing some of the mysteries of the island seen in FBYE and related episodes to time travel, are we to presume an alternative histories or consistent histories approach, or, perhaps some blurring of the two? Ms. Hawking’s admonition to Desmond of the dire consequences of his not turning the key might point us in the direction of the latter explanation. This parallels Kelvin’s explanation to Desmond that by pushing the button he was “Just saving the world” (“Live Together, Die Alone” 2.23). This interpretation is also bolstered by Desmond’s plaintive exclamation to Charlie and Hurley in FBYE, “You can’t change it, no matter what you do. You just can’t change it.”

But is this necessarily the only reasonable interpretation of the episode? Supporting the alternate histories approach is the inconsistency in the number of photographs, as well as the fact that Desmond, not the bartender, was hit by the cricket bat. Desmond has also seemingly changed history in saving Charlie several times throughout Season 3. The concept of “cheating death” threads itself throughout the Lost mythology. How did Eko, Desmond, Charlie, and Locke survive the implosion of the hatch? How did any of the Losties survive the plane crash? How was Charlie revived after being hung by Ethan in “All the Best Cowboys have Daddy Issues” (1.11)? Is it as Kate explained to Sayid in “The Moth” – that their survival “just happened. No rhyme, no reason”? In the Many Worlds Interpretation, all outcomes to an event that are possible, no matter how unlikely, are given reality in a parallel world. In some worlds, Charlie died from the lightning strike, but in some, by drowning trying to save Claire. In others he perished in the plane crash, while in others he died from hanging. There are also other universes in which he died at some earlier time from a heroin overdose, and even other universes where he was never born at all. Some of the fandom might want to jump to one of the plethora of universes where he didn’t die at the end of Season 3 either. There is therefore no paradox in Desmond’s choosing to save him, nor is there even a paradox in the Losties’ survival of the plane crash. Unlikely? Perhaps. But certainly not impossible, in the statistical meaning of the word. Perhaps we should ponder the words of Arthur C. Clarke, who explained that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But events do Charlie’s death at the end of Season 3 set into motion, and, perhaps more importantly, which of these events will Jack come to rue in the future? For as we witnessed in “Through the Looking Glass” (3.22), the future for the good Dr. Shephard is far from rosy. In the timeline the writers have chosen to show us (presumably the main timeline of the series), Jack and Kate (and at least one presumed other Lostie) eventually do make it off the Island alive, to Jack’s later sincere regret. Why the regrets? We will have to wait and see, as the 2007 Comic Con Q&A with Lindelof and Cuse revealed that the remaining three seasons of the show will continue in all three time periods: present (on the Island), past (flashbacks) and future (flashforwards). At this moment, we are left to ponder the possible meaning of Future Jack’s plaintive plea to Future Kate: “We were not supposed to leave…. We have to go back, Kate.” Will he succeed? Will he change the past, and hence the future? If he changes the past, what will that mean for Island? Or was he meant to change the past all along, and will therefore merely fulfill Locke’s thereby prophetic statement that Jack believes in destiny, he just doesn’t know it yet? Will he and Kate return to the island and become the "Adam" and "Eve" found in the cave? Is your head hurting as much as mine is right now? Let’s adjourn for some well-deserved aspirin and meet up again in the next chapter, shall we?

Numerous universes might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost, many fruitless trials made, and a slow but continual improvement carried out during infinite ages in the art of world-making – David Hume

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Carroll, Robert Todd (2006) “Philadelphia Experiment”, The Skeptic’s Dictionary http://skepdic.com/philadel.html (accessed February 17, 2007).

Davies, P.C.W. and S.A. Fulling (1977) “Radiation From Moving Mirrors and From Black Holes”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A356: 237-57.

Deser, S., R. Jackiw, and G. ‘t Hooft (1992) “Physical Cosmic Strings Do not generate Closed Timelike Curves.” Physical Review Letters 68(3): 267-9.

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[1] A Brief History of Time also makes an appearance in Ben’s house in “The Man From Tallahassee” (3.13). Are we supposed to take this as a hint as to how the Others were able to transport Locke’s father to the island?

[2] A brief comment on another random side effect of the hatch implosion, namely Desmond’s oh-so-not-tragic loss of clothes: Is this a reference to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, a famous study of the human animal, or a nod to The Terminator and The Time Traveler’s Wife, where only organic material makes the jump between times?

[3] The interested reader is directed to Pool 1990 for more information.

[4] Einstein himself had a marvelous sense of humor. One of the most famous photos of him was on a bicycle in California. He also said “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” Might the upside-down frame of a man riding a bicycle in the Orchid Station video unveiled at Comic Con 2007 be a nod to Einstein’s theories (and perhaps the idea of setting them on their heads?)

[5] Once upon a time, telling your colleagues you were studying time travel was a one-way ticket to a long-sleeved jacket with buckles and a vacation in a padded room. For this reason, and others, many of the first papers on time travel utilized the politically-correct code word CTCs instead.

[6] Those interested in the details of Hawking’s life and scientific works are shamelessly directed to Larsen (2005).

[7] In the original short story, the main toy is a strange doll which is internally anatomically correct - but not for a human. There is no apparent reason for the toys to be sent into the past other than to prove that it could be done.

[8] For more details on the Sagan-Thorne connection, and about Thorne’s work on wormholes in general, read his popular work Black Holes and Time Warps (1994) or the paper Morris and Thorne 1988.

[9] I have to admit that I was bouncing out of my seat at the viewing of the Orchid video at Comic Con, immensely enjoying the fact that I was probably one of only a handful of people in attendance who had any clue as to what the Casimir effect is.

[10] An intriguing 1984 paper by Robert Forward of the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory of Edwards Air Force Base studied the possibility of making a “Vacuum fluctuation battery” out of the Casimir effect.

[11] There is another random connection between A Wrinkle in Time and Lost: Mrs Who speaks in quotations, reminiscent of the Blast Door map in the Swan Station.

[12] The daring reader is directed to Gott 1991 and Deser et al. 1992 for both sides of the issue.

[13] Readers interested in the details of the ring laser time machine, and Ron’s fascinating life, are directed to Mallett and Henderson (2006) Those wishing to see the gory physics involved are pointed in the direction of Mallett 2000 and Mallett 2003.

[14] For an overview of both the consistent histories and alternate histories approaches, the reader is directed to Greene (2004). It should be noted that at a 2005 fan convention actor John Terry (Christian Shephard) suggested that fans read this book as a “possible clue” to the series, leading some fans to suspect that string theory (Greene’s forte) was the theory to be pondered (Porter and Lavery 2006, 177). Although we will consider string theory near the end of our journey, for scientific reasons I sincerely hope that the clue from John Terry was instead meant to direct viewers to Greene’s discussion of time travel and its paradoxes.

[15] Hume held the opinion that because of his inherent physical weakness, humans can only survive as the part of a larger group, as mirrored in Jack’s mantra “live together, die alone.” However, Hume noted that this same tendency inherently led to hostilities, as groups interacted with each other in competitive ways (as seen on the Island).

[16] The term multiverse is also used for other collections of realities, such as baby universes spawned in inflationary models of the universe, and the “landscape” of all possible solutions to string theory.

[17] Frank, the demonic “rabbit”, gives us yet another gratuitous lagomorphic connection.

[18] Yet another shameless self-serving commercial to follow: readers interested in learning more about the Big Bang will enjoy Cosmology 101, written by yours truly.

[19] Readers intrigued by the discussions in this section are encouraged to read Alexander Vilenkin’s Many Worlds in One (2006) and Alan Guth’s The Inflationary Universe (1997).

[20] A common misconception about inflation is that it replaces the Big Bang. It is actually a modification of the classic Big Bang model, developed to answer several problems and nagging questions. Although the exponential expansion which gives the theory its name only lasted for an infinitesimally small fraction of a second, its effects are visible for the entire history of the universe.

[21] The limbic system establishes our emotional states, links our conscious, unconscious, and autonomic brain functions, and aids in memory.

[22] Mathematical Forecasting Initiative, The Hanso Foundation

Comments on "The Beginning of the End" : Charlie's comments to Hurley about his being dead but really being there as well lead me to think it's a reference to the parallel reality theory. The fake Oceanic Airlines commercial shown afterwards during the premiere of Eli Stone meshes with this (the commercial is "invaded" by communications saying they'd found the wreckage of Oceanic 815 at the bottom of the ocean). Also, Charlie tells Hurley that he has to go back and help "them" (assuming it's whoever is left on the island) and we have Hurley telling Jack essentially what Jack told Kate at the end of last season - they have to go back to the island and were never supposed to leave.

So here's theory #42956889c: In an important "reality" Oceanic 815 crashed in the ocean killing all aboard. In a parallel reality they landed on the island (so to speak). When Desmond time traveled into the past, he changed things sufficiently so that the two realities mingled, which has bad consequences. In order to fix things, the survivors have to die in this reality (or at least go back to the island) so I think more than one of the "Oceanic Six" will meet unfortunate ends in the "flash forwards". Of course Jacob is an important part of this, but I'll leave my ideas concerning him for another day. In order to fulfill their destiny (to never leave the island and never return to the "primary reality"), Jack will complete his aborted pilot's training, and he and Kate will fly back to the island and become "Adam and Eve" (he gets the space coordinates right, but not the time coordinates).

Note the name of the man on the radio- George Minkowski. Hermann Minkowski was a mathematician whose techniques are used to describe space-time in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Minkowski said of relativity, "Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

Comment on episode 2: A dysfunctional physicist with the last name of Faraday? That's far too easy :)