Time Travel

In the book Lost Horizon, there is a crucial moment at the end of the story. Conway, the main character, and another of the plane crash victims struggle to make their way out of Shangri-La. With them is the character Lo-Tsen who looks about age 19, but has lived in Shangri-La for an untold number of years. When the three of them finally get out of the valley and into the mountains, Lo-Tsen instantly ages, becoming a frail old woman in a matter of seconds. It was as if time completely caught up with her the moment she leaves Shangri-La.

Last night on "The Economist," we were shown that due to whatever strange magnetic features the island possesses, time on the island moves more slowly. But I think the time difference between the island and the world is much more than 30 minutes. My theory is that time off of the island has progressed along with our own. While only 100 days have passed for the crash victims, in the rest of the world it's winter of 2008.

• In the ARG Find815.com created by the writers of the show, the ship Christiane I finds the remains of Oceanic flight 815 in the Sunda Trench, as later tied into the show. The timeline of the finding was very specific - it took place over Christmas of 2007. If the discovery of the wreckage took place before the freighter brought our four new characters to the island, then it must currently be 2008 or after.

• During this summer's Comic-con in San Diego, the writer/producers Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse were on hand to talk about the show and answer some questions. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Damon: It’s interesting that you should ask about time because… you know… you’re making a basic assumption that they’ve been there, y’know, as long as they think they’ve been there. [Crowd murmurs, someone says “Oh, no.”] I would say by the end of Season 3… that very different idea…
Carlton: Stop right there, Damon, stop right there.
Damon: Well, I was just…
Carlton: Stop right there. Nope, nope, no.

Seems like he was talking about something very key to this season.

• In the new episode Confirmed Dead, the new character Charlotte Staples Lewis is introduced. Her name is a reference to author C. S. Lewis who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. In those books, time passes in Narnia at a different rate - what seems like months and years in Narnia is only minutes in the outside world, and months passing in the outside world is a thousand years in Narnia.

So If time is moving the way I'm thinking, it could explain several things:

• Walt is taller because he began aging normally after he left the island. Several years have now passed for him.

• Mittelos Bioscience, the name of Richard Alpert's company, was confirmed as being the plot-significant anagram LOST TIME. This refers to the time lost while on the island.

• Alpert shows Juliet a CAT scan during the Mittelos recruitment. Juliet states that they appear to be from a woman in her 70's, while Alpert says the woman is only 26. It is possible that internal aging continues to occur at standard time, though time for the woman (and appearance) moves more slowly. It could also be the result of a woman leaving the Island; like in Lost Horizon, upon leaving the Island and reentering standard time aging may occur rapidly, thus a woman who only lived for 26 years (on the Island) could suddenly become old and die upon leaving.

• Alpert tells Juliet: "You're gonna be amazed at how time flies once you're there."


Regarding time, what might be most intriguing of all is the new orientation film for the Orchid station released by the producers last summer. In it, Edgar Halowax (aka Marvin Candle) says "The unique properties of this Island created a kind of Casimir effect, allowing us to..."
Later in the film a bunny identical to the one he's holding appears out of nowhere and everyone freaks out.

So if we do our research and look up what the hell the Casimir effect is, we learn that it's a physics term that relates to energy fields. This is a quote from the wikipedia entry:
"...the quantum mechanics of the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time, and suggested that negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel."

Ok, so suddenly we are introduced to the idea the the island has the capability to create wormholes in time/space. This would explain a lot.

• Perhaps when Desmond turned the failsafe key, perhaps he created a wormhole and was able to move freely about in space/time. He arrived at the place he wanted to be most - the time when he should've proposed to Penny.

• The polar bear found in Tunisia with a Dharma collar was an experiment in sending an animal through a wormhole to a different space/time.

• The reference to the book "A Brief History of Time"

• The recording in Room 23 saying "only fools are enslaved by time and space"

• Ms. Hawking (another reference to Stephen Hawking) - In an interview with ew.com the producers suggest that she travels through time.

• Sawyer is seen reading the book "A Wrinkle in Time" in the first season.

• The name of the airport that is shown to be used by Mittelos Bioscience in "One of Us" is "Herarat Aviation." Herarat is an anagram of Earhart, as in Amelia, whose plane mysteriously disappeared over the South Pacific. The reference to Amelia came back in Find815.com, when Sam overheard a transmission from the time of her disappearance on his radio in the cabin, which was unexplained by the radio station. The implication is that the transmission traveled through time.

Basically, my thought is that time on the island moves very slow, and contains the possibility of time travel.