The Physics Behind Lost by Marcus

Hi folks, this is an oldish theory which I’ve updated to include some thoughts on season 5 and 6. Hope you enjoy reading.

Where is the island? I believe the island exists inside a time bubble within a wormhole.

A wormhole is a structure which connects two distant regions of space time. Now wormholes although hypothetical are thought to be unstable and would require an unusual energy source to prevent total collapse. The energy source that keeps our wormhole open is the exotic matter located at the orchid. It has curious properties, one of which is it exerts a negative force, so if you tried to pump up a car tire using exotic matter it would do the opposite and deflate the tire. This negative force can be harnessed though, by sending it through the centre of a wormhole to keep it open. The island exists within this wormhole, inside a time bubble. One mouth of the wormhole moves around the pacific, the entry point, while the other exists in Tunisia, or the exit point as it’s known, but I’m curious as to why nobody can traverse through the wormhole from the Tunisian side to get to the island?? It seems to be a one way deal here

Now I want to focus on the mouth located in the Pacific and the best analogy I can use to help visualize this mouth is to use the gate in the film Stargate. In this film they dig up a gate, which appears to be one end or mouth of a wormhole, the other end exists somewhere in another galaxy, I’d like to just focus on the gate on earth for a moment. When the gate is switched on, a wormhole opens and a window looks through to the other side, except we can’t see the other side because of blue CGI effect in the film. However, let’s replace the blue CGI with a transparent effect instead; we should then be able to look straight through to the other side.

Now let’s take this window, make it a good deal larger, and place it in the Pacific Ocean. This now forms part of our complex lost wormhole and it’s the only safe way for the outside world to look at, and travel too, the island. The correct bearing is simply the location of the window itself.

Can the island be seen by an outside observer, someone in the real world who is travelling towards it on a different bearing? In other words is the island only visible from that specific bearing of 305, or can it be viewed just as easily from a bearing of 180? No, you can’t see it from any other bearing except 305. Inside the radius, yes no problem you can see the entire island from any bearing, but from outside its radius, in the real world, I would argue that no you can’t, and the only way to see it is by looking through the wormholes window. This is because, all that exists to us as outside observers is an entrance to a wormhole, nothing more, it’s a complex structure which contains just one correct entry point, the window, and lots of incorrect entry points, which are equivalent to the islands barrier, there’s no actual island barrier for us. Hope this makes sense? From an island perspective, it has a barrier, so if someone tried to leave it by passing through th! e barrier (time storm), they would emerge on our side from an incorrect point on the wormhole, and be dead a few days later from a brain aneurism.

Another blogger Ricky raised the point that sometime in the past the Tunisian side was possibly an entry point. I agree with that, it neatly explains how this Egyptian mythology came to be on the island in the first place. It’s no coincidence that Tunisia is very close to Egypt. At some point in the past someone probably discovered the Tunisian entry point by accident, travelled through it, and that was the beginnings off an Egyptian society on the island. They probably encountered the smoke monster and began to worship it. Maybe then MIB or Jacob became tired of all these people coming to the island, so they rotated or realigned the exotic matter to change the Tunisian side into an exit point instead, making the island almost impossible to find.

In season 4 Minkowski just wanted to “see” the island. Why did he have to pass through the barrier to see it? Surely he could’ve seen it from a safe vantage point? He couldn’t, because all that exists is a wormholes entry point and to see the island he would’ve had to pass through this entry point. From his perspective he wouldn’t have seen anything as he approached the mouth of the wormhole, just open water. He then enters the wormhole on the wrong bearing and has a smooth, instantaneous transition through to the other side, where he would then see the island come gradually into view. It would all appear normal and he wouldn’t realise anything was wrong until he began to have flashes.

On the Ajira flight Frank saw nothing on approach to the island. It was dark and very cloudy, was this a clever attempt by Darlton to conceal the fact that, off bearing, the island just isn’t visible by the outside world?

In TNPLH, you could argue that the chopper saw the island on its way back from the freighter as it was running out of gas, and it was outside the radius at the time. However we know frank always flew on the correct bearing, so I would argue that what frank and co were really looking through was the window of the wormhole, the producers were very careful here by only showing an external shot on the correct bearing. When Ben turned that wheel the exotic matter rotated, which remember, runs straight through the centre of our wormhole. This rotation changed the coordinates of our wormholes entry point, and that’s why the island seemed to disappear from the perspective we saw at the time(on the chopper)

For this to be consistent though it has to work both ways, the people on the island can only see the outside world by looking through the wormholes window on the correct bearing. This is confirmed in 5x01, when sawyer and Juliet were sitting on the beaching watching the freighter. They were looking directly through the window. When Ben turned the wheel the freighter vanished because the window changed location

Ben also knocked the exotic matter of its axis, which meant it moved around unpredictably. Since this exotic matter runs through the centre of the wormhole to keep it open, and now its fluctuating around, then the wormholes entry point in the pacific must be moving around too. The evidence for this was in 5x06 at the lamppost station, where the crosses on the map appeared in different parts of the pacific. However, if the entry point was just moving around in space, then there would be a whole host of markings on this map, but there wasn’t, this indicates that the entry point was also moving through time too.

I recommend you watch TNPLH with all these ideas in mind; it becomes obvious what’s going on. The producers wanted to show an external shot of the island being moved, that was the big reveal for the episode, but to do this, they first had to get all the players into position on the correct bearing. We first see the freighter move to 305, Juliet then moves to that beach, why?? With sawyer too. The chopper is on bearing 305 on its way back. Everything is all lined up ready for Ben, only then does he turn that wheel.

At the beginning of season 5 we see a workman attempt to drill through to the exotic matter only to collapse on the floor. What happened here? I think the vibrations from the workman’s drill bit disturbed the exotic matter. Even though these vibrations were tiny, they were enough to get the exotic matter to emit a small pulse of radiation and mind flash that workman through time. This is what Sawyer and co experienced but in a much greater scale. Ben’s wheel turn was a much larger disturbance for the exotic matter, and now that it’s off axis, it’s randomly emitting large pulses of radiation. Each pulse given off, mind flashed Sawyer and co through time. When Locke left the island he realigned the exotic matter and stopped the pulses.

What sunk the island?

I can think of a couple of possible explanations 1)The Jughead blast caused the volcano to erupt and set off some sort of landslide, or 2) We know the island moves through time, so it can’t be connected to the earth’s surface. It must be suspended in some way inside a time bubble within a wormhole. The islands negative energy runs through the centre of the wormhole to keep it open, and perhaps at some point this negative energy was destroyed, which would collapse the wormhole and release the island back into our world where it would immediately sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Another interesting thing about the islands volcano is, with a little bit of imagination and creativity, it can be used to create exotic matter. Below the island there is two tectonic plates, that rub together and cause earthquakes. Now the island has very special tectonic plates that are aligned exactly to create a Casmir effect. The Casmir effect states that when two large parallel plates are positioned very close to each other, a negative energy will form between them. Now imagine our islands tectonic plates are exactly parallel, and less than a millimetre apart. Surely a negative energy will form in the space between them? If your thinking that the chances of finding tectonic plates arranged in this way, by nature alone, are astronomical, then think about this, LOST uses the many worlds interpretation of the universe, which means that from the infinite amount of universes available , at least one will have a volcano with tectonic plates arranged in such a way as to gener! ate a Casmir effect. Being able to harness this energy though is another problem altogether.

Ok now for a brief word on the time bubble. A time bubble is a self contained world that branches off from our region of space-time and is sometimes called a baby universe. It exists in imaginary time which runs at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning and end. Our Lost wormhole connects us to the time bubble just like an umbilical cord. To help visualize a time bubble we can use an analogy. Space-time is like the sea as seen from a high vantage point, smooth and serene. If we move closer though, to smaller scales, it appears as waves and bubbles. At extremely small scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, spluttering into existence then dissolving. Quantum physics states that it’s probable, almost inevitable, that one of these small time bubbles will grow into a full-fledged universe. It’s important to stress here that the only way to interact with these bubbles would be through a wormhole, because they ‘re entirely ! their own universe and don’t take up any space in ours, or to quote Stephen Hawking

"They don't form in space; of course, it doesn't mean anything to ask where in space these things occur. They don't take up room in our universe but rather are their own universes, expanding into spaces that did not exist before.”

A final thought about the wormhole. There are many different types of wormhole and I’m not completely sure which type is being used on Lost. In this theory I’ve proposed a Wheeler quantum wormhole, which connects our universe to a time bubble, but Lost could just as easily be using an intra- universe wormhole, which connects two distant regions of space within the same universe. If this is the case, then the island might exist somewhere on another planet within a different galaxy, somewhere near the Crab Nebula perhaps? ) (Kudos to Lost Dbutz here. He raised the point of the Crab Nebula in another theory, can’t seem to find it anywhere now) The final shot of lost could be the camera panning out from the island to reveal that it’s not even in our own solar system.

That’s all I got for now. The wormhole stuff has been a difficult concept to explain and I’m probably wrong on some points. Thanks for reading.