The Art of World-making: Lost and Time Travel
Introduction
Time and Lost
Time Travel – Science Fact or Science Fiction?
Wormholes and Other Time Machines
Resolving the Paradoxes of Time Travel – Implications for Free Will
Further Speculations on the Connections Between Lost and Time Travel
“Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.”
- David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
The television series 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, “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 travel between parallel histories in different universes, as a result of time travel into the past (and possibly future). 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. In this vein, this paper will first summarize canon and fan references to time travel in Lost prior to the airing of FBYE, then review scientific theories of time travel (including well-known paradoxes involved in time travel and the resulting restrictions on free will), and conclude with a discussion of possible connections between these theories and the writers’ intentions/motivations in FBYE.
Time and Lost
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 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, “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” (Stafford 2006, 259). There are events which suggest that time seems to run at a strange rate on the island. For example, in “Exodus, Part I,” the wreckage of the Black Rock appears to be from the 19th century, but the dynamite it contains has somehow managed to survive intact (albeit in a rather unstable state). In “The Long Con,” 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 (Stafford 2006, 248-9). 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 seeming 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 (1962). 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. As Stafford (2006, 134) noted, in “The Greater Good,” one of Sayid’s friends is seen playing the video game Half-life in a flashback, a game in which the “player is a scientist who has accidentally opened a portal to an alien dimension.” In “Not in Portland,” 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. 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 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). All three of these relevant issues will be discussed later in this paper.
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. Porter and Lavery (2006, 177) explain that “Hypotheses concerning alternate universes and/or time travel and/or other dimensions have swirled about since Lost began.” 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….” In an often cited promise, the writers and producers have offered that a rational scientific (or science fiction) explanation can be had for the mysteries of the island (O’Conner and Stewart 2006, 223; Porter and Lavery 2006, 177). In light of this comment, it is instructional to look to these same authorities for confirmation that time travel did occur in 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:
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• Desmond really had the experience that was shown in the episode.
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• Desmond was “course corrected.”
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• The entire populace of “this planet and all other planets” would be destroyed if Desmond married Penny.
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• Desmond did manage to change history (for example, his getting hit in the face with the cricket bat instead of the bartender).
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• The change(s) to history will have “future ramifications.” (Lindelof and Cuse, 2007)
Given these canonical insights and fan theories, we will now survey the science behind time travel, its paradoxes, and implications for free will.
Time Travel – Science Fact or Science Fiction?
The basis for any serious scientific discussion of time travel or alternate dimensions is the work of Albert Einstein. In his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, he demonstrated that the known three dimensions of space and one of time are actually interwoven into a four-dimensional space-time. The theory is based on the postulate 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 ignored by science fiction writers). If one were to somehow travel faster than light, one would, indeed, travel backwards in time. Special relativity does, however, predict the possibility of future-directed time travel for normal physical objects. Because the speed of light is a constant 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. The interested reader is directed to Pool (1990) for more information. 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.
There is an old joke that only three people in the world understand General Relativity, including Einstein himself. 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.
If the presence of matter (and energy) can warp space-time, is it possible to warp it in such a way as to permit a material object to travel backwards in time? Not only is it possible to generate solutions of the Einstein field equations that contain such closed timelike curves (or CTCs, as time loops are technically termed in the scientific literature), but a number of such solutions have been found. 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.
However, with the possibility of CTCs come 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 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.
The connection between time travel and freewill, as well as Hawking’s more recent thoughts on time travel, will be considered in greater detail later in this paper. As an aside, the reader interested in the details of Hawking’s life and scientific works is directed to Larsen (2005).
Wormholes and Other Time Machines
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, physicist Kip Thorne, in 1995. He was worried that his physics wasn’t quite right. Like other science fiction writers, he was trying to get his heroine from earth to a distant location (in this case, the star Vega, and beyond) faster than the speed of light would allow. 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 traversable tunnel in space-time (Thorne 1994). Afterwards, 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 somehow change history (Morris, Thorne, and Wheeler 1988). Readers interested in further details of wormhole properties are directed to Morris and Thorne (1988).
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 keep the “throat” of the wormhole open long enough for one to travel through it, it is necessary to thread it with “exotic matter” – matter which has a negative energy density.
Although “negative energy” seems 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 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. It has been shown experimentally that parallel metal plates in a vacuum set very close together will feel a tiny attractive force due to the presence of the virtual pairs – this is called the Casimir effect. 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.
But if these are “virtual” particles, how can they affect the “real” world in any large-scale way? To answer this, we turn to Stephen Hawking’s most famous theoretical discovery (1974), which studied 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” due to a negative energy flow into the black hole. In “Not in Portland,” Aldo is seen reading the chapter of A Brief History of Time in which Hawking describes these results.
Negative energy can theoretically be created in situations other than the neighborhood of a black hole or between closely spaced metal plates. For example, Davies and Fulling (1977) demonstrated that a mirror moving near the speed of light creates negative energy in front of it as it moves. The problem in applying this to the construction and stability of a traversable wormhole is the amount of negative energy required – calculations by Matt Visser have shown that stabilizing a one-meter wide wormhole would require more energy that the sun’s total lifetime energy output (Greene 2004, 467). Another problem is that vacuum fluctuations may also destroy the wormhole as soon as it is formed (Hawking 1992). Therefore 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 (Ibid., 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. For example, Ronald Mallett has demonstrated that a circulating beam of electromagnetic radiation, (such as a ring laser) will theoretically warp space-time in such as way as to create CTCs. It has been proposed that this model could be used (given the proper laser technology) to construct a workable time machine (Mallett 2003). Although the necessary technology is at least a decade away, one 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. Readers interested in the details of the ring laser time machine are directed to Mallett and Henderson (2006).
Resolving the Paradoxes of Time Travel - Implications for Free Will
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.
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? Hawking (1996) offered two possible resolutions to these paradoxes, which he called the “consistent histories” and “alternative histories” approaches. 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, another ongoing theme in Lost. Numerous characters utter the phrase “don’t tell me what to do,” and appear to make active choices (such as Locke’s warning to Charlie in “The Moth” to ask for his heroin three times). But if the consistent histories approach to time travel is being played out on the island, all the characters’ seemingly free choices are 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 (after whom Desmond David Hume is apparently named). Ayer (1980, 76-7) summarizes Hume’s argument as follows:
The conclusion which Hume drew from this is that 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. In stark contrast, we find in Eastern traditions the concept of karma. From the 108 beads on the traditional mala, to the name DHARMA 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 (Buddha Dharma Education Association 2007). 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. In one universe, a copy of you stopped reading this article after the first paragraph, in another a copy of you stopped reading after the second paragraph, and in yet another, a copy of you decided not to read the article 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. 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 the “total lack of effect of one branch on another also implies that no observer will ever be aware of any ‘splitting’ process” (Ibid., 460). 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 Deutsch (1997) 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).
As appealing as this 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.
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). But as Stephen Hawking declared string theory “pretty pathetic” for its lack of ability to make predictions observable with current technology (Hawking and Penrose 1996, 123), perhaps the clue from John Terry was instead meant to direct viewers to Greene’s discussion of time travel and its paradoxes.
Further Speculations on the Connections Between Lost and Time Travel
More speculative (and some downright fraudulent) applications of time travel have been posited, both in popular literature as well as in Lost fan discussions. Many of the latter relate to the obvious magnetic anomaly of the island, associated most directly with the DHARMA Initiative’s interest in electromagnetic research and the mysterious “incident” that occurred at the Swan Station (referenced in “Orientation”), which subsequently necessitated discharging magnetic energy every 108 minutes (“Live Together, Die Alone”). 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 DHARMA Initiative and the so-called Philadelphia Experiment (O’Conner and Stewart 2006, 184). This is alleged to have been a secret Navy experiment called Project Rainbow conducted on October 28, 1943, in which a failed attempt to dematerialize and teleport the U.S.S. Eldridge supposedly resulted in horrific and deadly side effects on the crew (including invisibility and insanity). 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 (e.g. Einstein and Bergmann 1938). 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” (Ibid.). 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.
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 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. This fictional premise has a scientific precedent. In a seminal paper, Blau, Guendelman and Guth (1987) 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 Farhi and Guth (1987) 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? Certainly the “pit” left behind is visually reminiscent of space-time diagrams of black holes.
What are we to make of the strange energy emitted at the time of the implosion (such as the “sky turning purple”, the horrific “blender” noise, and the sudden disruption of communication of the outside world Tom began to explain to Jack in “Not in Portland”)? Is it as simplistic as an artificially induced atmospheric electromagnetic storm (complete with purple aurora created from the glowing of the air’s nitrogen molecules and the overloading of electrical systems) or is it something far more fascinating? In response, we will entertain the highly speculative possibility of one further reference to actual scientific theory. It has been shown 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 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 symbolic of the child universe’s painful birth? We leave it to the reader to ascertain if the author has stretched the thread of credibility at this point of the analysis to the breaking point.
Setting aside these last few speculations, we are left with the science, pseudoscience, and philosophy behind time travel and its paradoxes to help us reflect upon the ultimate meaning of FBYE. 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”). This interpretation is also bolstered by Desmond’s plaintive exclamation to Charlie and Hurley, “No matter what you do, you 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 already saving Charlie several times. The concept of “cheating death” threads itself throughout the Lost mythology, literally as well as symbolically (as in Juliet’s ex husband’s death by bus in “Not in Portland”, ala Final Destination). 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”? 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. 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.” As we continue to digest, discuss, and debate the intellectual breadcrumbs tossed in our direction, the viewers of Lost will eagerly await the writers’ next plot twists to see what mind-bending combination of science, technology, and magic will evolve.
Kristine Larsen
Physics and Earth Sciences Department,
Central Connecticut State University
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