Warning, this is mostly a scientific examination of events that take place on the Island, and specifically, of time travel. It refers to many concepts gleaned from research on Wikipedia. This theory is pretty complex and has a lot of subtle nuances that I've been working on for quite some time. I've also just come off re-watching the whole series to date, and worked on various parts of the theory during the re-watch.
Semi-spoilers ahead. If you haven't seen season 4, Spoilers on. If you haven't read anything about Season 5 there's really no spoilers there, except that I'm fairly certain that time travel plays a big role in the last two seasons of the show.
To begin, somebody does know the future on this show – whether through legit, controlled time travel through the Orchid station (or other possible stations), or from the “time travelling sickness.” And someone is manipulating events…nudging them through to their current iteration. According to Miss Hawking and Daniel Faraday, "you can't change the future." However, as we've seen, events can be manipulated, but in such a way that prevents inconsistencies.
“Iteration” is an important word to Lost. It’s encountered in the second half of the Pilot episode when the group first encounters Rousseau’s 16 year message… The strange and somewhat scary male voice declaring “Iteration 17294530…” However, my idea of “iterations” isn’t quite the same…but could be considered parallel.
Closed Timelike Curves:
"of all the things you could choose to do today, Charlie..."
First, a few definitions. A "light cone" in Physics represents any possible future evolution of an object given its current state. An object's possible future locations are limited by the speed the object can move given its current location. A Closed Timelike Curve (CTC) occurs when a series of light cones are set up so as to loop back on themselves. It is then possible for an object to move around this loop and return to the same place. In a CTC, causality breaks down because an event can be simultaneous with its cause - in some sense, an event could cause itself (the grandfather paradox). In a deterministic universe, complete knowledge of the universe on a spacelike Cauchy surface can be used to calculate the complete state of the rest of spacetime. A Cauchy surface is like an “instant” in spacetime – consider it as the present, or a single moment in time. The theoretical “Novikov Self Consistency Principle” does not allow a traveler to change past events in any ! way, but it does allow them to affect past events in a way that produces no inconsistencies. FOR EXAMPLE: a time traveler could rescue people from a disaster, replace them with realistic corpses seconds before it occurs. Providing the rescuees do not reemerge until after the time traveler first journeyed into the past, so that the motivation for traveling to the past remained intact.
If this is the case with Oceanic 815, there is only one thing that motivated the pilot to change course and come into close proximity with the island - the dead radio. Somebody else had to have been on that plane and knocked out the radio. A time traveller? The traveller would have had to have left very close to a "purple sky event” (but not necessarily the Swan implosion). If we consider an alternate timeline of events (a previous iteration) in which a purple sky event occurs, where the survivors of Oceanic 815 DO NOT REACH the island, what happens? Well, what is accomplished by the survivors of Oceanic 815? They reach the hatch. Desmond is about to read his book and presumably commit suicide. If Desmond dies and nobody's in proximity to the Swan station, the numbers run down to zero and the anomaly detonates and takes the whole world with it (which we can assume from "Mrs. Hawking"). The events that follow lead to a brief period of the survivors "pushing the button" and ! then Desmond turning the failsafe key. If there is a previous iteration where Oceanic 815 crashes and everybody dies, then someone, most likely an Other, may have just enough time to use the Orchid station (or another, similar station, possibly located elsewhere, that is capable of creating a Closed Timelike Curve) to travel backward in time to "influence events" in just the right way so that his or her motivation for travelling back would remain intact. And the bodies of Oceanic 815 were replaced with corpses, so we do have some reason to assume something like this could have occurred.
Einstein's Relativity does allow for multiple universes - an infinite number. Consider a certain number of these multiple universes to be different iterations of similar events. For instance, in our universe, Napoleon loses at Waterloo, but in another universe, Napoleon wins. So, using the CTCs as an example, Desmond is viewing different occurrences in varying iterations: 1) where Charlie is struck by lightning 2) where Charlie drowns 3) where Charlie's neck is broken on the rocks 4) where Charlie's shot by an arrow. Each iteration could actually be an alternate universe? A tangent possibility? In each of these iterations, Charlie never reaches the Looking Glass station, never notifies Penny, the O6 are never rescued. Desmond's actions are the wild card that prevents this, and would've never occurred if Desmond had not been rescued from suicide by Locke pounding on the door. Consider Desmond as Charlie's course correction, and Locke as Desmond's - Charlie was meant to be in ! the Looking Glass station to turn off the jamming signal. Since it was programmed by a musician, no one else would've been able to turn it off - it *must* have been Charlie.
Events are mapped out immediately in a deterministic universe. My actions now are going to have an effect in 20 minutes, in an hour, in a day, in a year, and so on. On a cosmic scale, those events take place whether my consciousness can perceive them or not...this is "fate"..."destiny"..."determinism."
For Lost, events that occur "for a reason" are a string of events that line up to produce some kind of inevitable outcome. 1) Swan destruction. 2) Looking Glass shut down. 3) Freighter destroyed, Island and its inhabitants rescued from Keamy's plan to "torch" the Island. Perhaps the Numbers are an indicator...a marker that something needs to be accomplished in this string of events. The Lost Experience ARG may not be officially in canon, but it gives us some insight into the Numbers. According to the Lost Experience, the Numbers are the values resulting from the Valenzetti Equation. The Valenzetti Equation is, like Ozymandias in the comic book Watchmen, trying to calculate the exact point in the future when the human race is extinguished. The Numbers are entered into a computer that prevents the destruction of the human race (according to Mrs. Hawking). After the Swan station and the electromagnetic anomaly are safely detonated, the Numbers become less prominent, but still a! ppear in the background. Then, the O6 are rescued and Hurley is faced with the Numbers directly (in his car) again... indicating that something must be accomplished.
The most obvious candidate for manipulating time is Richard Alpert, who does not appear to age in his various appearances throughout time. However, since the actual nature of the “Others” or the “Hostiles” is not known, I don’t want to exclude the possibility that the Others do not age and are acting according to some unknown prophecy, that involves some sort of miraculous leader who’s healed by the island’s properties, kills his father, and leads them into some sort of utopian future (such as Locke, or even Ben). Other possible candidates for time manipulation include Mrs. Hawking, who is tinkering with events in Desmond’s past at least (ensuring he follows a certain path), and possibly the monk Brother Campbell who possesses a picture of himself and Mrs. Hawking (Campbell also fires Desmond just before he meets Penny, which is a direct result of the firing. Coincidence?). There’s also Widmore and Ben, of course, who are playing some strange “game” tha! t we don’t have enough information to ascertain, but can assume it’s similar to chess or backgammon… and probably uses the Island itself as the board. Widmore was clearly in control of something before Ben, and his act of leaving the water running during Desmond’s jumps in “The Constant” suggests he knows more about time travel than he’s letting on. (This may have been a reference to the film Donnie Darko, in which, according to "The Philosophy of Time Travel," water and metal are the key elements of time travel. "Water is the barrier element for the construction of Time Portals used as gateways between Universe and Tangent Vortex. Metal is the (transitional) element for the constructions of Artifact Vessels." In each scene that Desmond travels back and forth in time, Water and Metal are prominently featured somewhere in the scene, whether it be Storm and Helicopter, passing by a water drainage pipe by the stairs, or Widmore leaving the water running from a si! nk with a metal faucet. Anyway, I digress.)
"it's a poor sort of memory that works backwards," said the Red Queen to Alice.
The time traveling sickness - this could account for the inability of certain individuals to die until certain events take place - Jack, Locke, or Michael. Michael can't die until he contributes to the O6 rescue. (the "inability of death" being attributable to "the Island" could just be a red herring.) In other words, "the inability of death" is just another form of the self-consistency principle..."course correction.” The sickness results from close proximity to the island – or maybe more accurately, the horizon that surrounds the island. We haven’t seen anyone on the island itself sick…only people *close* to the island. Desmond’s time jumping doesn’t happen until he attempts to leave the island – Minkowski’s not sick until he gets closer to the island. But I'll get back to time-travel and the inability of death in a minute.
Tipler Cylinder: “Frank J. Tipler showed in his 1974 paper, 'Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation' that in a spacetime containing a massive, infinitely long cylinder which was spinning along its longitudinal axis, the cylinder should create a frame-dragging effect. This frame-dragging effect warps spacetime in such a way that the light cones of objects in the cylinder's proximity become tilted, so that part of the light cone then points backwards along the time axis on a space time diagram. Therefore a spacecraft accelerating sufficiently in the appropriate direction can travel backwards through time along a CTC.”
If I’m understanding this correctly, consider the vault in the Orchid station the Tipler cylinder. As it rotates, it warps spacetime in a way that the light cones of objects (i.e. the person or animal within the vault) points backward along a time axis and they travel backwards in time. This would be a CTC. The fact that the time machine itself is not infinitely long can be attributed to artistic license.
Continued: “An objection to the practicality of building a Tipler cylinder was discovered by Stephen Hawking, who proved a theorem showing that according to general relativity it is impossible to build a time machine in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, (The weak energy condition stipulates that for every future-pointing timelike vector field, the matter density observed by the corresponding observers is always non-negative) meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy. The Tipler cylinder, on the other hand, does not involve any negative energy.”
However, exotic matter exists on the island and in close proximity to the Orchid station. Continued: “Hawking points out that because of his theorem, 'it can't be done with positive energy density everywhere! I can prove that to build a finite time machine, you need negative energy.' This result comes from Hawking's 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture, where he examines 'the case that the causality violations appear in a finite region of spacetime without curvature singularities' and proves that '[t]here will be a Cauchy horizon that is compactly generated and that in general contains one or more closed null geodesics which will be incomplete. One can define geometrical quantities that measure the Lorentz boost and area increase on going round these closed null geodesics. If the causality violation developed from a noncompact initial surface, the averaged weak energy condition must be violated on the Cauchy horizon."
The chronology protection conjecture is another way of looking at self-consistency or “course correction.” This Cauchy horizon could be thought of as what surrounds the island itself – which means that the island itself operates very similarly to a black hole. It’s a “light-like boundary separating time-like geodesics on one side and space-like geodesics on the other, and is generally considered to be the boundary of the singularity itself.” The problem is that a Cauchy horizon exists inside a black hole – it’s a second horizon, inside the event horizon. “The outermost horizon is an event horizon, beyond which information cannot escape, but where the future is still determined from the conditions outside. Inside the inner horizon, the Cauchy horizon, the singularity is visible and to predict the future requires additional data about what comes out of the singularity.”
What comes out of the horizon of the Island but the Oceanic Six, Ben, Walt, and Desmond? Desmond is a confirmed time traveler. Ben has knowledge of time travel. If at some point, one of these characters with knowledge of the Island travels to the past, the distant past, and somehow influences events, then the events on the Island must ensure that this or these individuals are available to travel to the past in the first place. And that death is unable to claim them or those that influence them before that point in time. If, somehow, events fail to produce this result, then a new iteration must occur in order to prevent such causality violations.
Causality violation itself may have much more to do with what's actually going on in the show than we think. The producers, Damon and Carlton, have stated on many occasions that they don't want to treat Time Travel the way a "Heroes" or a "Back to the Future" would. On "Heroes," causality is violated constantly by the characters Hiro and Peter, who are always traveling to the future, the past, etc. and really messing up events. "Back to the Future II" in particular is a good example of a screwy causality violation, because while Marty and Doc are in the future, Biff hijacks the time machine, travels back to 1955 and gives young Biff the Sports Almanac, which effectively rewrites history in such a way that the future in which Doc and Marty are still messing around should not exist. Yet it does exist, and Biff is able to return the Time Machine to this spacetime location. (This makes zero sense.) Damon and Carlton are very particular about setting specific rules for Time Trave! l that will prevent such inconsistencies. Such a Causality Violation was teased when Doc Ray was told about the Morse Code message from the beach (where they'd already discovered his corpse) and had his throat slit seconds later.
Possible causality violations in theory: Future Locke is somehow Jacob. Future Walt is somehow Abaddon. "Adam and Eve" are possibly Future Kate and Jack or Future Desmond and Penny. Mrs. Hawking and Brother Campbell are actually Future Penny and Future Desmond. Say John Locke is somehow thrown into the past in the new season. Something strange happens to him and his consciousness is somehow trapped between worlds, and this creates the entity Jacob. (Jacob, in this sense, is a lot like Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode "The Tholian Web" when he phases between dimensions with the spaceship Defiant.) However, Jacob's influence over John, and John's knowledge of Jacob somehow create Jacob? That's a Causality Violation. If Jack and Kate actually are Adam and Eve, then their discovery of their own corpses is what drives them to 1) stay at the caves 2) go back to the beach...which leads them down a path that takes them back in time and eventually kills them in those caves in th! e distant past? It's also unlikely that Desmond and Penny travel back in time to ensure that they influence themselves as Mrs. Hawking and Brother Campbell. Even if somebody travels to the distant past and hands down a prediction about the coming of the Others' messiah/leader, Locke or Ben, there's danger of a causality violation there. This could also explain, if Jacob is Locke, why Jacob's not speaking to him, but Christian is. Obviously, Jacob and Christian had to be chatting about something in "The Beginning of the End." However, perhaps the possibility of a causality violation is why the Others are not forthcoming with their knowledge. Sharing information with the 815ers could create a causality violation, if one of them is the person who travels back and gives the message. Even Juliet, after becoming a trusted member of the survivors' camp, shares absolutely nothing about who the "Others" are, despite clearly having some knowledge.
At some point in the future, Jack could very well contract this Time Traveling sickness, travel back to Oceanic Flight 815, and sabotage the radio somehow. His future consciousness then leaves his 815 body, and he awakens on the plane none the wiser. All the events that follow must ensure that Jack survives the flight and is set on a specific path of events that will convince him to knock out the radio if he is to travel back and perform this sabotage. That's a CTC. It's also fraught with Causality Violations, especially if we consider an iteration where Oceanic 815 does not reach the island and is destroyed. Our problem may be that we're looking at "course correction" through too limited a scope. Maybe there are several things working toward course correction (or Chronology Protection as Stephen Hawking would say). Iterations, tangent universes that can't be sustained (just as in the film Donnie Darko), and Self Consistency. This Island is a vortex where all these possibili! ties meet. Not just these possibilities, but all possibilities. We need look no further than the freighter's science team: a physicist with time travel experience (and memory problems, which are probably attributable to "time-traveling sickness"), a cultural anthropologist (with ties to the Island), and a ghost whisperer.
The question then is, what can account for the Vortex?
It's fairly obvious that the race of people who once lived on the Island who constructed its various ruins (and attributed to its hieroglyphs) were advanced beyond measure. A Colossus-of-Rhodes-sized statue once stood as a guardian to its shores. A donkey wheel connected to some vast machinery capable of displacing the entire Island exists beneath the Orchid station, and therefore, in close proximity to the negative exotic matter required for time travel. And, this wheel/machinery/whatever must have been constructed long ago. Hieroglyphs cover that too. And the door to summon the monster...
The monster… well, the problem with the monster is part of the problem of how the dead are handled on the island. Look at the Others in particular. Colleen’s death at the beginning of season 3 is interesting. The Others have funeral rites similar to Hindus – the corpse is set on fire and put out to sea. The mercs in season 4 are particular to quickly bury Karl and Rousseau in shallow graves. Ghosts are everywhere. And then you have the monster appearing as a dead character like Yemi. Then there’s the disappearance of a corpse like Christian Shepherd. Yemi’s corpse also disappeared from the drug plane...
If you look at the problem of the monster as part of the problem of how the dead are handled on the island, it’s possible that the monster assimilates the dead – and that the Others and the Mercs are afraid of the monster assimilating more.
We also have to look at the possibility that the ghosts are some sort of actual physical manifestation of the dead. Since the human body operates according to electronic impulses moving through the central nervous system, perhaps the electromagnetic anomaly or the electromagnetic properties of the island act as a recorder for a consciousness… and that maybe the Monster is a manifestation of these “recordings” – and that all the ghosts are actually in tandem with the Monster; maybe every time we see a ghost, despite what the producers say, we’re seeing an element of the Monster. A collective of ghosts working with the monster… This also explains the “whispers.”
As far as Ben “controlling” the monster, I don’t quite think it’s that easy. Ben's nowhere near his monster-summoning closet when, say, Eko is killed. Yeah, there could be more than one "summoning" closet, but on the Hydra island? I'd like to think that the monster is a little more complicated than just being Ben's pet – it “reads,” it judges, and it kills. Maybe it’s more accurate to think that the person in this position, Ben or whoever, can negotiate with the monster…instead of summoning it or controlling it. The same as he can communicate with Jacob doesn't really mean that he can control Jacob (although, Jacob is contained by the ash...)
The monster could very well be some kind of timekeeper, a security system for causality itself. Those who play a part in this CTC (beginning and ending with Flight 815) are viewed by the monster and are let past. Those who have no further purpose for causality are discarded. The "hand of fate" to put it in a context. Maybe the monster is the Chronology Protection Agency, as Stephen Hawking suggests. What created it? Why does it read, judge, and kill? It kills Seth Norris, Mr. Eko, Nikki (supposedly), and Mayhew (one of the Freighter mercs). It manipulates reality and induces visions, usually of the dead.
Then there’s moving the Island. For this, I’ve got no choice but to refer to an article in Popular Mechanics that came out the day after the season 4 finale: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4266329.html - “Einstein Would Approve of Moving the Island on Lost.” To give you the main idea: “To make physics sense of the movement of the island in Lost, I assume that the island is actually connected to the South Pacific by a wormhole-like warp in space-time. (It doesn't have to be a simple worm hole; it could be a warren of parallel and intersecting tubes.) Then, to move the island, all you have to do is move the wormhole connection, not the island itself. That's what I think Ben did. He changed the nature of the space-time connection between the island and the rest of the world. So the island didn't disappear. It didn't even move. Imagine that you are visiting a small town that you used to visit when you were young. You drive for miles, and never come to! it. But it turns out the town has not moved. Rather, the highway now goes around it. That's what Ben did—he changed the highway.”
This doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the Causality Violations of earlier in this “essay” other than moving the Island should, theoretically, change the relationship between the Island and the rest of the Earth in such a way that prevents Causality Violations. If you move it “forward” or “backward” in time, as some theories suggest, you’d land the Island on top of itself – which would be catastrophic. Or, you’re only moving the people and objects on the Island forward or backward, you’re not moving the Island – the Island itself doesn’t budge. Yet, we know it vanishes. Now, I will say that I’ve seen the spoilers, and I have no idea if that’s correct or not. I think spoilers would indicate that my theory on island movement is somehow incorrect. The writers have put the story beats there for a reason – course correction, constants and becoming unstuck in time, the inability of death, and moving the island. These are key plot points for the fu! ture of the show. They’ve set the rules for the endgame, and now we just have to wait and see.
We as the audience understand that Jack is wrong in his stance about the Island - things do happen for a “reason” on the show. It’s just a matter of understanding why, and why the Island itself is attributed this “reason.” We as the audience therefore also understand that Locke is wrong in his stance as well – it is just a piece of land, and a piece of land doesn’t have the power to insist it’s will upon people in the way represented in the show. Jack and Locke are both wrong and right, and that’s the way the whole show has played out. It’s almost like the disconnect between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – we’re only looking for the mechanism to connect the two in order to bring about a Grand Unified Theory of Physics – a Theory of Everything. We just need to find the mechanism that connects Jack’s Science and Locke’s Faith. I think this theory works in just that particular way.
Theory by heathen_king
Semi-spoilers ahead. If you haven't seen season 4, Spoilers on. If you haven't read anything about Season 5 there's really no spoilers there, except that I'm fairly certain that time travel plays a big role in the last two seasons of the show.
To begin, somebody does know the future on this show – whether through legit, controlled time travel through the Orchid station (or other possible stations), or from the “time travelling sickness.” And someone is manipulating events…nudging them through to their current iteration. According to Miss Hawking and Daniel Faraday, "you can't change the future." However, as we've seen, events can be manipulated, but in such a way that prevents inconsistencies.
“Iteration” is an important word to Lost. It’s encountered in the second half of the Pilot episode when the group first encounters Rousseau’s 16 year message… The strange and somewhat scary male voice declaring “Iteration 17294530…” However, my idea of “iterations” isn’t quite the same…but could be considered parallel.
Closed Timelike Curves:
"of all the things you could choose to do today, Charlie..."
First, a few definitions. A "light cone" in Physics represents any possible future evolution of an object given its current state. An object's possible future locations are limited by the speed the object can move given its current location. A Closed Timelike Curve (CTC) occurs when a series of light cones are set up so as to loop back on themselves. It is then possible for an object to move around this loop and return to the same place. In a CTC, causality breaks down because an event can be simultaneous with its cause - in some sense, an event could cause itself (the grandfather paradox). In a deterministic universe, complete knowledge of the universe on a spacelike Cauchy surface can be used to calculate the complete state of the rest of spacetime. A Cauchy surface is like an “instant” in spacetime – consider it as the present, or a single moment in time. The theoretical “Novikov Self Consistency Principle” does not allow a traveler to change past events in any ! way, but it does allow them to affect past events in a way that produces no inconsistencies. FOR EXAMPLE: a time traveler could rescue people from a disaster, replace them with realistic corpses seconds before it occurs. Providing the rescuees do not reemerge until after the time traveler first journeyed into the past, so that the motivation for traveling to the past remained intact.
If this is the case with Oceanic 815, there is only one thing that motivated the pilot to change course and come into close proximity with the island - the dead radio. Somebody else had to have been on that plane and knocked out the radio. A time traveller? The traveller would have had to have left very close to a "purple sky event” (but not necessarily the Swan implosion). If we consider an alternate timeline of events (a previous iteration) in which a purple sky event occurs, where the survivors of Oceanic 815 DO NOT REACH the island, what happens? Well, what is accomplished by the survivors of Oceanic 815? They reach the hatch. Desmond is about to read his book and presumably commit suicide. If Desmond dies and nobody's in proximity to the Swan station, the numbers run down to zero and the anomaly detonates and takes the whole world with it (which we can assume from "Mrs. Hawking"). The events that follow lead to a brief period of the survivors "pushing the button" and ! then Desmond turning the failsafe key. If there is a previous iteration where Oceanic 815 crashes and everybody dies, then someone, most likely an Other, may have just enough time to use the Orchid station (or another, similar station, possibly located elsewhere, that is capable of creating a Closed Timelike Curve) to travel backward in time to "influence events" in just the right way so that his or her motivation for travelling back would remain intact. And the bodies of Oceanic 815 were replaced with corpses, so we do have some reason to assume something like this could have occurred.
Einstein's Relativity does allow for multiple universes - an infinite number. Consider a certain number of these multiple universes to be different iterations of similar events. For instance, in our universe, Napoleon loses at Waterloo, but in another universe, Napoleon wins. So, using the CTCs as an example, Desmond is viewing different occurrences in varying iterations: 1) where Charlie is struck by lightning 2) where Charlie drowns 3) where Charlie's neck is broken on the rocks 4) where Charlie's shot by an arrow. Each iteration could actually be an alternate universe? A tangent possibility? In each of these iterations, Charlie never reaches the Looking Glass station, never notifies Penny, the O6 are never rescued. Desmond's actions are the wild card that prevents this, and would've never occurred if Desmond had not been rescued from suicide by Locke pounding on the door. Consider Desmond as Charlie's course correction, and Locke as Desmond's - Charlie was meant to be in ! the Looking Glass station to turn off the jamming signal. Since it was programmed by a musician, no one else would've been able to turn it off - it *must* have been Charlie.
Events are mapped out immediately in a deterministic universe. My actions now are going to have an effect in 20 minutes, in an hour, in a day, in a year, and so on. On a cosmic scale, those events take place whether my consciousness can perceive them or not...this is "fate"..."destiny"..."determinism."
For Lost, events that occur "for a reason" are a string of events that line up to produce some kind of inevitable outcome. 1) Swan destruction. 2) Looking Glass shut down. 3) Freighter destroyed, Island and its inhabitants rescued from Keamy's plan to "torch" the Island. Perhaps the Numbers are an indicator...a marker that something needs to be accomplished in this string of events. The Lost Experience ARG may not be officially in canon, but it gives us some insight into the Numbers. According to the Lost Experience, the Numbers are the values resulting from the Valenzetti Equation. The Valenzetti Equation is, like Ozymandias in the comic book Watchmen, trying to calculate the exact point in the future when the human race is extinguished. The Numbers are entered into a computer that prevents the destruction of the human race (according to Mrs. Hawking). After the Swan station and the electromagnetic anomaly are safely detonated, the Numbers become less prominent, but still a! ppear in the background. Then, the O6 are rescued and Hurley is faced with the Numbers directly (in his car) again... indicating that something must be accomplished.
The most obvious candidate for manipulating time is Richard Alpert, who does not appear to age in his various appearances throughout time. However, since the actual nature of the “Others” or the “Hostiles” is not known, I don’t want to exclude the possibility that the Others do not age and are acting according to some unknown prophecy, that involves some sort of miraculous leader who’s healed by the island’s properties, kills his father, and leads them into some sort of utopian future (such as Locke, or even Ben). Other possible candidates for time manipulation include Mrs. Hawking, who is tinkering with events in Desmond’s past at least (ensuring he follows a certain path), and possibly the monk Brother Campbell who possesses a picture of himself and Mrs. Hawking (Campbell also fires Desmond just before he meets Penny, which is a direct result of the firing. Coincidence?). There’s also Widmore and Ben, of course, who are playing some strange “game” tha! t we don’t have enough information to ascertain, but can assume it’s similar to chess or backgammon… and probably uses the Island itself as the board. Widmore was clearly in control of something before Ben, and his act of leaving the water running during Desmond’s jumps in “The Constant” suggests he knows more about time travel than he’s letting on. (This may have been a reference to the film Donnie Darko, in which, according to "The Philosophy of Time Travel," water and metal are the key elements of time travel. "Water is the barrier element for the construction of Time Portals used as gateways between Universe and Tangent Vortex. Metal is the (transitional) element for the constructions of Artifact Vessels." In each scene that Desmond travels back and forth in time, Water and Metal are prominently featured somewhere in the scene, whether it be Storm and Helicopter, passing by a water drainage pipe by the stairs, or Widmore leaving the water running from a si! nk with a metal faucet. Anyway, I digress.)
"it's a poor sort of memory that works backwards," said the Red Queen to Alice.
The time traveling sickness - this could account for the inability of certain individuals to die until certain events take place - Jack, Locke, or Michael. Michael can't die until he contributes to the O6 rescue. (the "inability of death" being attributable to "the Island" could just be a red herring.) In other words, "the inability of death" is just another form of the self-consistency principle..."course correction.” The sickness results from close proximity to the island – or maybe more accurately, the horizon that surrounds the island. We haven’t seen anyone on the island itself sick…only people *close* to the island. Desmond’s time jumping doesn’t happen until he attempts to leave the island – Minkowski’s not sick until he gets closer to the island. But I'll get back to time-travel and the inability of death in a minute.
Tipler Cylinder: “Frank J. Tipler showed in his 1974 paper, 'Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation' that in a spacetime containing a massive, infinitely long cylinder which was spinning along its longitudinal axis, the cylinder should create a frame-dragging effect. This frame-dragging effect warps spacetime in such a way that the light cones of objects in the cylinder's proximity become tilted, so that part of the light cone then points backwards along the time axis on a space time diagram. Therefore a spacecraft accelerating sufficiently in the appropriate direction can travel backwards through time along a CTC.”
If I’m understanding this correctly, consider the vault in the Orchid station the Tipler cylinder. As it rotates, it warps spacetime in a way that the light cones of objects (i.e. the person or animal within the vault) points backward along a time axis and they travel backwards in time. This would be a CTC. The fact that the time machine itself is not infinitely long can be attributed to artistic license.
Continued: “An objection to the practicality of building a Tipler cylinder was discovered by Stephen Hawking, who proved a theorem showing that according to general relativity it is impossible to build a time machine in any finite region that satisfies the weak energy condition, (The weak energy condition stipulates that for every future-pointing timelike vector field, the matter density observed by the corresponding observers is always non-negative) meaning that the region contains no exotic matter with negative energy. The Tipler cylinder, on the other hand, does not involve any negative energy.”
However, exotic matter exists on the island and in close proximity to the Orchid station. Continued: “Hawking points out that because of his theorem, 'it can't be done with positive energy density everywhere! I can prove that to build a finite time machine, you need negative energy.' This result comes from Hawking's 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture, where he examines 'the case that the causality violations appear in a finite region of spacetime without curvature singularities' and proves that '[t]here will be a Cauchy horizon that is compactly generated and that in general contains one or more closed null geodesics which will be incomplete. One can define geometrical quantities that measure the Lorentz boost and area increase on going round these closed null geodesics. If the causality violation developed from a noncompact initial surface, the averaged weak energy condition must be violated on the Cauchy horizon."
The chronology protection conjecture is another way of looking at self-consistency or “course correction.” This Cauchy horizon could be thought of as what surrounds the island itself – which means that the island itself operates very similarly to a black hole. It’s a “light-like boundary separating time-like geodesics on one side and space-like geodesics on the other, and is generally considered to be the boundary of the singularity itself.” The problem is that a Cauchy horizon exists inside a black hole – it’s a second horizon, inside the event horizon. “The outermost horizon is an event horizon, beyond which information cannot escape, but where the future is still determined from the conditions outside. Inside the inner horizon, the Cauchy horizon, the singularity is visible and to predict the future requires additional data about what comes out of the singularity.”
What comes out of the horizon of the Island but the Oceanic Six, Ben, Walt, and Desmond? Desmond is a confirmed time traveler. Ben has knowledge of time travel. If at some point, one of these characters with knowledge of the Island travels to the past, the distant past, and somehow influences events, then the events on the Island must ensure that this or these individuals are available to travel to the past in the first place. And that death is unable to claim them or those that influence them before that point in time. If, somehow, events fail to produce this result, then a new iteration must occur in order to prevent such causality violations.
Causality violation itself may have much more to do with what's actually going on in the show than we think. The producers, Damon and Carlton, have stated on many occasions that they don't want to treat Time Travel the way a "Heroes" or a "Back to the Future" would. On "Heroes," causality is violated constantly by the characters Hiro and Peter, who are always traveling to the future, the past, etc. and really messing up events. "Back to the Future II" in particular is a good example of a screwy causality violation, because while Marty and Doc are in the future, Biff hijacks the time machine, travels back to 1955 and gives young Biff the Sports Almanac, which effectively rewrites history in such a way that the future in which Doc and Marty are still messing around should not exist. Yet it does exist, and Biff is able to return the Time Machine to this spacetime location. (This makes zero sense.) Damon and Carlton are very particular about setting specific rules for Time Trave! l that will prevent such inconsistencies. Such a Causality Violation was teased when Doc Ray was told about the Morse Code message from the beach (where they'd already discovered his corpse) and had his throat slit seconds later.
Possible causality violations in theory: Future Locke is somehow Jacob. Future Walt is somehow Abaddon. "Adam and Eve" are possibly Future Kate and Jack or Future Desmond and Penny. Mrs. Hawking and Brother Campbell are actually Future Penny and Future Desmond. Say John Locke is somehow thrown into the past in the new season. Something strange happens to him and his consciousness is somehow trapped between worlds, and this creates the entity Jacob. (Jacob, in this sense, is a lot like Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode "The Tholian Web" when he phases between dimensions with the spaceship Defiant.) However, Jacob's influence over John, and John's knowledge of Jacob somehow create Jacob? That's a Causality Violation. If Jack and Kate actually are Adam and Eve, then their discovery of their own corpses is what drives them to 1) stay at the caves 2) go back to the beach...which leads them down a path that takes them back in time and eventually kills them in those caves in th! e distant past? It's also unlikely that Desmond and Penny travel back in time to ensure that they influence themselves as Mrs. Hawking and Brother Campbell. Even if somebody travels to the distant past and hands down a prediction about the coming of the Others' messiah/leader, Locke or Ben, there's danger of a causality violation there. This could also explain, if Jacob is Locke, why Jacob's not speaking to him, but Christian is. Obviously, Jacob and Christian had to be chatting about something in "The Beginning of the End." However, perhaps the possibility of a causality violation is why the Others are not forthcoming with their knowledge. Sharing information with the 815ers could create a causality violation, if one of them is the person who travels back and gives the message. Even Juliet, after becoming a trusted member of the survivors' camp, shares absolutely nothing about who the "Others" are, despite clearly having some knowledge.
At some point in the future, Jack could very well contract this Time Traveling sickness, travel back to Oceanic Flight 815, and sabotage the radio somehow. His future consciousness then leaves his 815 body, and he awakens on the plane none the wiser. All the events that follow must ensure that Jack survives the flight and is set on a specific path of events that will convince him to knock out the radio if he is to travel back and perform this sabotage. That's a CTC. It's also fraught with Causality Violations, especially if we consider an iteration where Oceanic 815 does not reach the island and is destroyed. Our problem may be that we're looking at "course correction" through too limited a scope. Maybe there are several things working toward course correction (or Chronology Protection as Stephen Hawking would say). Iterations, tangent universes that can't be sustained (just as in the film Donnie Darko), and Self Consistency. This Island is a vortex where all these possibili! ties meet. Not just these possibilities, but all possibilities. We need look no further than the freighter's science team: a physicist with time travel experience (and memory problems, which are probably attributable to "time-traveling sickness"), a cultural anthropologist (with ties to the Island), and a ghost whisperer.
The question then is, what can account for the Vortex?
It's fairly obvious that the race of people who once lived on the Island who constructed its various ruins (and attributed to its hieroglyphs) were advanced beyond measure. A Colossus-of-Rhodes-sized statue once stood as a guardian to its shores. A donkey wheel connected to some vast machinery capable of displacing the entire Island exists beneath the Orchid station, and therefore, in close proximity to the negative exotic matter required for time travel. And, this wheel/machinery/whatever must have been constructed long ago. Hieroglyphs cover that too. And the door to summon the monster...
The monster… well, the problem with the monster is part of the problem of how the dead are handled on the island. Look at the Others in particular. Colleen’s death at the beginning of season 3 is interesting. The Others have funeral rites similar to Hindus – the corpse is set on fire and put out to sea. The mercs in season 4 are particular to quickly bury Karl and Rousseau in shallow graves. Ghosts are everywhere. And then you have the monster appearing as a dead character like Yemi. Then there’s the disappearance of a corpse like Christian Shepherd. Yemi’s corpse also disappeared from the drug plane...
If you look at the problem of the monster as part of the problem of how the dead are handled on the island, it’s possible that the monster assimilates the dead – and that the Others and the Mercs are afraid of the monster assimilating more.
We also have to look at the possibility that the ghosts are some sort of actual physical manifestation of the dead. Since the human body operates according to electronic impulses moving through the central nervous system, perhaps the electromagnetic anomaly or the electromagnetic properties of the island act as a recorder for a consciousness… and that maybe the Monster is a manifestation of these “recordings” – and that all the ghosts are actually in tandem with the Monster; maybe every time we see a ghost, despite what the producers say, we’re seeing an element of the Monster. A collective of ghosts working with the monster… This also explains the “whispers.”
As far as Ben “controlling” the monster, I don’t quite think it’s that easy. Ben's nowhere near his monster-summoning closet when, say, Eko is killed. Yeah, there could be more than one "summoning" closet, but on the Hydra island? I'd like to think that the monster is a little more complicated than just being Ben's pet – it “reads,” it judges, and it kills. Maybe it’s more accurate to think that the person in this position, Ben or whoever, can negotiate with the monster…instead of summoning it or controlling it. The same as he can communicate with Jacob doesn't really mean that he can control Jacob (although, Jacob is contained by the ash...)
The monster could very well be some kind of timekeeper, a security system for causality itself. Those who play a part in this CTC (beginning and ending with Flight 815) are viewed by the monster and are let past. Those who have no further purpose for causality are discarded. The "hand of fate" to put it in a context. Maybe the monster is the Chronology Protection Agency, as Stephen Hawking suggests. What created it? Why does it read, judge, and kill? It kills Seth Norris, Mr. Eko, Nikki (supposedly), and Mayhew (one of the Freighter mercs). It manipulates reality and induces visions, usually of the dead.
Then there’s moving the Island. For this, I’ve got no choice but to refer to an article in Popular Mechanics that came out the day after the season 4 finale: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4266329.html - “Einstein Would Approve of Moving the Island on Lost.” To give you the main idea: “To make physics sense of the movement of the island in Lost, I assume that the island is actually connected to the South Pacific by a wormhole-like warp in space-time. (It doesn't have to be a simple worm hole; it could be a warren of parallel and intersecting tubes.) Then, to move the island, all you have to do is move the wormhole connection, not the island itself. That's what I think Ben did. He changed the nature of the space-time connection between the island and the rest of the world. So the island didn't disappear. It didn't even move. Imagine that you are visiting a small town that you used to visit when you were young. You drive for miles, and never come to! it. But it turns out the town has not moved. Rather, the highway now goes around it. That's what Ben did—he changed the highway.”
This doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the Causality Violations of earlier in this “essay” other than moving the Island should, theoretically, change the relationship between the Island and the rest of the Earth in such a way that prevents Causality Violations. If you move it “forward” or “backward” in time, as some theories suggest, you’d land the Island on top of itself – which would be catastrophic. Or, you’re only moving the people and objects on the Island forward or backward, you’re not moving the Island – the Island itself doesn’t budge. Yet, we know it vanishes. Now, I will say that I’ve seen the spoilers, and I have no idea if that’s correct or not. I think spoilers would indicate that my theory on island movement is somehow incorrect. The writers have put the story beats there for a reason – course correction, constants and becoming unstuck in time, the inability of death, and moving the island. These are key plot points for the fu! ture of the show. They’ve set the rules for the endgame, and now we just have to wait and see.
We as the audience understand that Jack is wrong in his stance about the Island - things do happen for a “reason” on the show. It’s just a matter of understanding why, and why the Island itself is attributed this “reason.” We as the audience therefore also understand that Locke is wrong in his stance as well – it is just a piece of land, and a piece of land doesn’t have the power to insist it’s will upon people in the way represented in the show. Jack and Locke are both wrong and right, and that’s the way the whole show has played out. It’s almost like the disconnect between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – we’re only looking for the mechanism to connect the two in order to bring about a Grand Unified Theory of Physics – a Theory of Everything. We just need to find the mechanism that connects Jack’s Science and Locke’s Faith. I think this theory works in just that particular way.
Theory by heathen_king
