Here is a theory that the Exotic Material in the orchid and the Electromagnetic Energy at the swan rely on each other. This may be entirely wrong or partially right, but it may be an interesting read either way.
So, you have a pocket of exotic material under the orchid. Also you have a pocket of electromagnetic energy under the swan. We know that the orchid can control time. I have a thought that the Orchid is directly affected by the Swan.
What if the pocket of exotic material in the orchid was directly affected by the pocket of Electromagnetic energy in the swan. Kind of like a fine tuned watch, the energy in the swan kept the energy in the Orchid "tuned" and everything flowed well. The Electromagnetic energy kept the Donkey Wheel moving correctly and thus kept time moving correctly and the island stayed hidden and moved through time and space.
Then entered DHARMA…. In an effort to control time, they worked on the Orchid. They discovered that the Electromagnetic energy where the swan would be could actually control time. So, the swan was built. But, in an effort to do time travel, something soon went wrong with their experiments between the swan & the Orchid.
Now something that DHARMA did (AKA the incident) caused the wheel to fall off its axis similar to when Ben turned the wheel. The island started to skip and DHARMA was unaware of what to do. During the incident, the island skipped in time and caused more problems on the island. I think that the black Rock was grounded during this time, since Horace didn’t seem to know what it was in 1974. People may have disappeared during these time skips, including the 815ers, maybe the statue toppled, pregnancies were affected… Maybe Richard told Ben that a way to fix it would be for Widmore to turn the wheel, since maybe Widmore is working with DHARMA in this period more than we know… It could be that DHARMA even used a polar bear to try and move the wheel…
Finally, however it happened, the wheel was stopped, and the island stopped skipping. In an effort to stop the wheel from spinning out of control they did something to stop the wheel. Maybe DHARMA figured the way to stop the wheel was to freeze it. But they stopped the continuous flow of Electromagnetic energy from the Swan to the Orchid. Then once they had the Orchid under control, they used the chamber to do time travel experiments.
It could be that DHARMA used electromagnetic energy from the Swan to do these experiments. Now, we know that by resetting the timer in the Swan station every 108 minutes helped disburse a charge that built up. I think this disbursement of electromagnetic energy is DHARMA’s way of making sure the Swan still affects the Orchid and allows for Time Travel experiments. They probably determined that if they waited much longer than 108 minutes that the charge build up would destroy the Swan. If they sent the charge to the Orchid quicker than 104 minutes then the charge wouldn’t be strong enough for experiments. So the window of entering the code was set to enter between 104 and 108 minutes.
Now, could it be, that the numbers were the coordinates for the destination of the charge? Could the 4,8,15 regard to the location of the swan on the island and 16,23,42 be in regard to the location of the Orchid? There was a location on the Flame computer in Namaste that showed that there was a system check in Sector 42, could that have been a code name for the Orchid Station? I know that the Sri Lanka video said they were the core values of the Valenzetti Equation. But when has DHARMA been straight forward in their orientation videos?
Maybe the turning of the fail safe key was the process to return the island back to its original time flow, thus making it impossible for further time travel experiments to be done. If the fail safe hadn’t been turned maybe the electromagnetic force would have continued to build and eventually caused a black hole to form? Theory by 1Miletogo
