Time After Time

Remember Captain Kirk? If he didn't let poor Edith Keeler die, he would have created a paradox and erased his own future. The Guardian of Forever (pictured here) said: "Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before." This was my early exposure to the concept of TIME TRAVEL. I mean I've watched hundreds of shows since then including The Time Tunnel, various Outer Limit episodes and Quantum Leap just to mention a few, but none captured my imagination like that first time.

I think one of the inherent mysteries of LOST island is Time Travel.

There have been many different clues scattered throughout various episodes that allude to time travel. Many people have also tried to tie this in with alternate dimensions or additional timelines. I believe there is only one timeline. I think it is fluid, in flux and always changing the present. everyone in this reality changes with it without realizing a change has even taken place. They have no fixed point to reference to see a change has taken place because they change with it.

Charlie can't swim, now Charlie is a junior swim champion and nobody objects, because to them the first reality is gone. Something transpired in the stream of time that changed everyones perception. We are television viewers and do have a fixed point of reference, so we remember Charlie saying he can't swim.

I really enjoyed Ray Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder" in the context that it illustrates how going back in time and changing one thing creates a ripple effect that alters the future. This is described as the butterfly effect. But this only explains what happens when a change in the past makes ripple changes from that point forward in time ( theoretically then, nothing prior to the event change would be altered ). History up to that point would have remained the same.

This is the concept of Linear time. In this concept time moves only forward.


My Theory

In Lost Island Time, time is not linear, it is "ALWAYS", no beginning and no end, it is Circular.

Imagine the Ourborous, make a change to any part of the circle and the whole circle is affected. Any point in time changes and all time changes to accomodate this. If you are part of the stream you do not realize you change also, as you are always in a state of change.


Fate as a Force

Ms. Hawking was not concerned for the fellow in the red shoes, because he would have died anyway.

If not in the construction accident , then a slip in the shower and a broken neck. In order for the ripple of change to complete the Ouroboros circle, he had to die. Otherwise there would be a bottleneck of change either stored up until he died or it would have flowed backwards, changing the past, somehow, someway he had to die. If the universe couldn't have accomplished his death in the construction accident because of some interference, it would have made a course correction and killed him some other way.

Charlie was only going to cheat death so many times until the universe corrected for him. Every time he cheated death with Desmond's help something in in the circle changed. Perhaps the ripple didn't go in one direction, maybe it went the opposite direction around the circle, affecting his youth before coming back to the spot on the circle we call the present. Thus his youth is changed to make him a swim champion, and everyone else in our reality doesn't know any different.

Time has no beginning and Time has no end. Make any change and that change resonates through all of time, forwards, backwards, all around the circle.

Time and Paradox

Imagine building a time machine, stepping in a going back ten years and killing yourself. If you killed yourself, then how could you have built the time machine ten years later? This is a paradox and could only be possible in Linear time.

In Lost Island Time, you could not build the time machine, or travel through the circle to a point 10 years earlier, because the time stream is in constant flux. that moment you want to go back to doesn't exist, other events have altered the time stream and it updates them constantly. Even if you could go back to that moment 10 years earlier, the mere fact of you arriving there would eliminate the other you, because that other you is now the present you.


This is why Desmond didn't run in to past Desmond in 1996. He simply replaced past Desmond in 1996.

The Novikov self-consistency principle applies (named after Dr. Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, Professor of Astrophysics at Copenhagen University). The principle states that if you travel in time, you cannot act in such a way so as to create a paradox.


Maybe the Captain of Naomi's Boat will be called Novikov?

The whole idea of being enslaved by time and space is because we perceive time as linear. Just as we perceive the universe as finite. Time is endless and events don't necessarily affect things in only one direction in time

Dimensionality

There is still room in my theory for more dimensions, they are not exclusive of time, but go along with the flow of everything else. This might be where Jacob lives, or where the whispers are coming from, I don't know. I'd actually like some reader feedback here so I can formulate my theory on the whispers better ( some future article).

Now my head hurts...

I got started on this by reading an article on EYE M SICK's excellent website. Check out the link to his site on the right in my LOST links. Lots of great theories out there, and I'm sure you have time to read them all between now and January.

Namaste
hatchling23