I think most of you would agree, the concept of time as it’s been presented on Lost… isn’t easy. And maybe that’s because fiction usually presents time travel in a very different way.

We’ve been conditioned by ‘the Movies’ to believe that time travel allows you to change the course of history. Which is ironic, because its actually a much more complicated theory than what Lost has been presenting so far.

Just to refresh us, this is how Faraday sees it…

Time is a straight line. No deviations. Just a long straight line made up of occurrences… things that happen.

And the two end points on this line are The Beginning and The End… of whatever… your day, your life, the existence of the Universe. And since this line is solid (no spaces however small) the number of points/occurrences that make it up… is infinite. Things happening moment to moment. The fastest frame rate you can imagine.

Now clearly, we live our lives on this line. Except to us, it doesn’t feel like we’re living on a line at all… because we can’t see it. We’re told there’s a line. We can imagine what might be ahead of us on this line… we can remember what was behind us on the line… but we can only see so far as the point we’re on. It’s the only thing we’re sure exists.

But the other points do exist. They always have. Although we can’t see them, the ones behind us haven’t gone away, nor are the ones in front of us yet to be built. They’re all there… every point, every occurrence has already been written… otherwise there couldn’t be a line.

And so if time travel were to happen on a line like this (people jumping from one point to another, out of sequence), it’s because it’s part of the story of that line. Sure, it may seem odd for people to be jumping around… but that doesn’t matter, cause everything fits, and the line itself still has the same order of events… things won’t change because they don’t need to. The story has already been written… for that particular timeline.

Notice I said particular timeline. And this is where it gets a little more difficult. Because according to String Theory, there isn’t just one Timeline. There are a lot. In fact, just like the infinite number of occurrences that make up a timeline, there are an infinite number timelines that make up a universe. Some vastly different, some different only by one extra heartbeat.

I found this video a couple years ago. And even though it’s a very general way of explaining some of the dense concepts of String Theory, it did help me understand a lot of this. And if you’re having difficulty with Lost’s Time/Space continuum, it may help you too.

Don’t feel bad if it takes you a few viewings to get it all. I still have to constantly rewind it at the 6th dimension. But once you do absorb the basic concepts, I think you’ll view the show’s time travel premise a little differently. And for those who have already seen it, I still find it refreshing to watch on occasion. It might be a good primer going into the finale… I don’t know.

PART 1

Now remember, Faraday is a quantum physicist, so he should certainly understand these concepts much better than we. Which is why it’s reasonable to accept his explanations on the show as scientifically sound… and they are.

But like any good story, what makes this one special, is that Faraday seems to have overlooked something… made a small mistake.

At the beginning of the season he believes they’re time traveling across the 4th dimension. Across their own strict timeline. There’s no doubt he’s aware of the 5th and 6th. He just doesn’t consider it a possibility for what’s happening. Maybe because his university experiments dealt only with the 4th? I don’t know.

But I think what he’s realized during his time in Ann Arbor is that they’ve actually traveled across the 6th. That jump may have happened only after Locke turned the wheel, but none the less, they aren’t on their original timeline anymore.

That means they can change things… not to the timeline itself. But to their lives… as they bounce around a much larger 5th dimension with its infinite range of outcomes… writing a new story that fulfills both them… and us.

Here’s the second half of the video. It digs even deeper into reality’s stacks of dimensions. Have fun! And happy Movement Monday!

PART 2

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