Approaching Lost: Food for thought from Popular Mechanics
February 4, 2010 by Robin Parrish
SPOILER WARNING: Season 6 premiere “LA X” discussed ahead.
Michio Kaku, host of the Science Channel’s Sci-Fi Science, and guru of making-science-easy-for-the-rest-of-us, has some cool thoughts about “LA X” you’ll want to consider. I’ll put it after the jump for those who haven’t seen the ep yet.
Kaku posits that in Season 6, Lost is heading into quantum physics — specifically the idea of parallel universes. Consider this:
Dead Juliet was right: Faraday’s plan did work. And this is where Lost is on solid science ground. Like Fringe, the show is now diving headfirst into multiverse theory, where the river of time forks constantly into different universes. “According to this theory, our universe is a bubble of some sort, which is constantly expanding,” explains Kaku. “But there are other bubbles out there, floating above us. These other universes are invisible, since light passes below them.”
Until now, Lost has said that whatever happened, happened. You can’t change the past. And that’s also right, according to Novikov’s self-consistency principle. When the castaways detonated Jughead, they created another universe in which Oceanic 815 never crashed.
I find this idea fascinating… on paper. I mean, the idea of parallel universes is pretty cool, heady, brain-bending stuff.
But for dramatic purposes, I find it a little hard to swallow that Lost is showing us two parallel yet independent-of-each-other universes. Because what would be the point? Where would it be going? The very notion of the multiverse supposes that new universes are born like a fork in the road, and from there, they split. They diverge. They don’t ever come back together.
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