1. Yes, as we've all been wondering... Will parallel/mirrorverse 'realities' pierce the 'veil' separating them, with increasing frequency and intensity? That would seem to be the consensus. And Jack's opening query regarding his appendix certainly suggests this will be the case.
2. Of course, the Annotated Alice (In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) reference strikes multiple chords, including Jack swallowing the poison pill intended for Sayid, mirroring NEO taking the pill in the Matrix, enabling him to 'cross over' to a new reality, down the veritable rabbit hole.... Another clear resonance-- especially given the hints at cross-'verse parallel channels of consciousness and communication-- is the Through The Looking Glass connection not only to Jacob's lighthouse mirror, but also to experiments on using sterile neutrinos as a means communicating across time and space, a connection I've covered in prior postings. 1
4. As some have predicted, Darlton are 'riffing' on The Sixth Sense theme of seeing dead people. Jacob's ability to affect who does and does not see him provides yet another confirmation of 'magical' abilities wielded by beings who have undergone multiple death/rebirth Samsaric cycles, moving up that veritable Jacob's Ladder of island enlightenment. And of course, the OBI-WAN Star Wars/The Force reference hits many of the same points, from a different angle....
5. Regarding Miles' offhand comment to Hurley-- "Shocker"-- is this foreshadowing a Psych Ward collective delusion, or a Leonard Sims illusion, as some of us have been speculating...? For one of my more recent speculations long those lines, please see the 2/3/10 "LAX" posting.
6. Skeletons in the cave.... are the really them? Another reference to death/rebirth cycling, karmic looping, reincarnations, parallel/mirrorverses, affording additional opportunities, for heuristic learning and redemption....?
7. Jacob's LIGHTHOUSE of.... ALEXANDRIA...!? One of the Seven Wonders of the World? 2 Not exactly, but somewhat reminiscent thereof....
8. "Tell me when it gets to 108 degrees...." Degrees of freedom and perception.... It would have been interesting to see What Lies Reflected In The Mirror's Light at the 108 degree mark. As that number is the sum of six people located on the CANDIDATE CIRCUMFERENCE, it would have gratifying to see the results of choices made throughout the ongoing current war for souls (no telling how many times this cycle has been repeated before!) You may have just blown a shot at seeing who will end up on whose side, Jack.... !
9. And as per my prediction below, the function of the lighthouse mirror in allowing Jacob to watch chosen 'candidates' may well be presaging a larger reveal that the island has all along been serving as a spacetime nexus, a portal to viewing (and accessing?) parallel, mirror realities. Please see below, and my 2/18/10 "Mirror Matters" posting, for further thoughts in this regard....
10. Smashing the Mirror....! Shades of The WHO's Tommy, eh?! David didn't want Jack to see him fail... Lost baggage, losing bad baggage, yes indeed that can be a very good thing.... Nothing is irreversible....
11. It's A Wonderful Life... Jacob-cum-Clarence the good angel showing Jack how important he is.... It worked for Jimmy Stewart.... Will this help Jacob 'get his wings' through climbing higher on the ladder of enlightenment?
12. Someone bad going to the temple... unLocke/MIB....? And yes, his darkside recruit/candidate CLAIRE is looking pretty B.A., to be sure....! Those dark un-versions/inversions must certainly provide juicy roles to sink one's teeth into!
Heh-heh-heh....
Sawyer's 'Crunch Time' And Reversible Computing: The Island As A Heisenbergian Uncertainty Reduction Generator-
As we've observed in seasons past, some of Sawyer's seemingly 'throwaway' side comments have contained some important 'Easter Egg' clues for us to unwrap and savor.... His recent "crunch time" comment raises some intriguing possibilities within a parallel/Mirrorverse plotline in the garden of good and evil, unfolding on the island in Season 6. Indeed, "crunch" is not an uncommon way to speak of computing-- one is "crunching the numbers"-- and to "crunch time" invokes an interesting and relevant connection to the Comicon-leaked phrase "Nothing is irreversible...." In particular, "crunch time" directs our attention to the relevance of Reversible Computing and related concepts for pondering the nature and form of Reversibility that we may see in play during Season 6 of Lost:
"Reversible computing, sometimes called non-destructive computing includes any computational process that is (at least to some close approximation) reversible; i.e., time-invertible, meaning that a time-reversed version of the process could exist within the same general dynamical framework as the original process.... In the context of reversible physics, the phenomenon of entropy increase (and the observed arrow of time) can be understood to be consequences of the fact that our evolved predictive capabilities are rather limited, and cannot keep perfect track of the exact reversible evolution of complex physical systems, especially since these systems are never perfectly isolated from an unknown external environment, and even the laws of physics themselves are still not known with complete precision. Thus, we (and physical observers generally) always accumulate some uncertainty about the state of physical systems, even if the system's true underlying dynamics is a perfectly reversible one that is subject to no entropy increase if viewed from a hypothetical omniscient perspective in which the dynamical laws are precisely known.... Although achieving this goal [reversible computing] presents a significant challenge for the design, manufacturing, and characterization of ultra-precise new physical mechanisms for computing, there is at present no fundamental reason to think that this goal cannot eventually be accomplished, allowing us to someday build computers that generate much less than 1 bit's worth of physical entropy (and dissipate much less than kT ln 2 energy to heat) for each useful logical operation that they carry out internally."
Yes, in addition to the island's unique energy properties producing the Casimir Effect and other weird phenomena, enabling time-travel looping and sideways shifting to the Shadowlands of Mirrorversic parallel realities, as you saw in the aforementioned Wikipedia excerpt, Darlton are exactly right when they say that nothing is irreversible, since our conception of a 'Time's Arrow of Irreversibility' is an artefact of our inherently limited perceptual and conceptual faculties, bound and defined as we are as materially-instantiated beings in the Universe....
Thus we can see that the phrase "Nothing is irreversible" and the dynamics we're seeing displayed on Lost not only invoke wonder from the standpoint of showing us seemingly 'magical' phenomena, they also are a higher-order critique on our fundamentally self-centered and anthropocentrically-biased means of knowing ourselves and the universe, grasping 'reality' through our inherently limited perceptual/conceptual apparati, and through our anthropocentric technological extensions of said apparati, drilling downward in scale to the Micro- and Nanoscopic (e.g., the Scanning Tunneling Microscope) 3 to Macroscopic scales tackling broad expanses of the Universe....
Hmmm.... If the island is indeed a special place, housing and enabling access to an omniscient perspective, a form of MIND not fettered as we are by our MATTER-bound envelopes of corpor-reality, then we should not be surprised to serve witness to reversible dynamics operating on and through the island. Again, this may be another instance of Darlton showcasing our inherent hubris and anthropocentrism as a species, riffing on and telescoped up from JACK'S self-centered hubris in attempting to force his own rewrite on the Tapestry of Life, destroying and repatching portions of the very fabric woven through forces beyond the scale and scope of his prideful and limited perspective....
Accordingly, the island will then have been revealed to be a functional equivalent of a Heisenbergian Uncertainty Reduction Generator, a HURGy as it were, housing and providing access to: (1) higher planes of perception, affording exact knowledge of dynamical laws in operation, forward and backward in spacetime, allowing us to stand outside of and resolve seemingly immutable constraints borne of Heisenbergian Uncertainty; and (2) higher (game) levels of action, enabling not only time-travel and sideways parallel/Mirrorverse shifting, but also allowing for Reversibility.... Indeed, one potential sequence might be as follows: (1) leverage the island's powers to Casimirically loop backward in Time; (2) while back in Time, use the island to achieve a sideways shift to a parallel/Mirrorverse; then (3) set a new 'daisy chain' of cause-effect relationships in motion....
But what really occurred during the sideways shift? While I and others have been pondering ways in which the move may have entailed an opening up or access to a parallel/Mirrorverse, more recently I'm wondering (per the above) if what is really happening is that we are seeing how the island functions as a literal ISLAND IN THE STREAM of dynamic spacetime reality, including multiple equally 'real' forms such as Mirrorverses, Multiverses, and even Bohmian Explicate Orders. 4 What may be happening is that the island really is a HURG, housing a form of Matter-unfettered Mind-ful omniscience, in turn yielding omnipotent powers of Reversibility, all in non-magical ways which only appear to be 'magical' to us Homo Sapiens due to our inherently limited perceptual and conceptual faculties, producing a flawed anthropocentric view of spacetime phenomena and the Universe at large.
In short, the island may be an existential singularity that opens and closes on a myriad of different parallel/mirror 'universes', and when the island 'exists' and operates on a particular 'version of reality/Earth', its effects may be felt and observed on/in that reality, including disruptions of communication devices, time-bending/shifting, and more.... We may yet learn that when the island is not 'present' and operating on a particular 'verse, it is sunken on that 'verse, but when it is present and operating, it is moving and working on that 'verse.... On this view, the island may not be just a portal between one 'verse and its mirror twin 'verse, but instead the island may be located as a spacetime nexus/portal operating among a myriad of different equally real versions of 'verses, as such constituting a dream/fate-writing device for weaving different tapestries of spacetime reality....
Black Hole, White Hole: unLockeing Clues From The Blond-Haired 'Halo Kid'-
In my 2/18/10 Mirror Matters posting, I proposed that unLocke-cum-Smokey is a DAEMON:
In addition to noting that Smokey's status as a DAEMON-based entity may help explain why the sonic fence served as an effective barrier impeding 'his' movement, movement, it also helps us understand why the light gray Jacob's Ash Cremata may be able to serve the same function (Hint: Jacob's a LEMON!) Simply put, we may yet learn that just as Smokey is a dark-matter-comprised, micro black hole-enabled, shape-shifted form of unLOCKE/MIB, JACOB and other light recruits on the island are 'ordinary'-matter-comprised beings with micro white hole-enabled shape-shifting abilities.... ala....
Yes, you guessed it.... the distinctive white 'halo' on the ground as the blond-haired boy appeared to unLocke and Alpert in The Substitute suggests that light-side beings are not DAEMONS, but rather are LEMONS, i.e., Light Electric Matter Objects associated with Micro White Holes.... Indeed, one of my earlier postings examined possibilities that the island may be functioning as a WHITE HOLE:
"In astrophysics, a white hole is the hypothetical time reversal of a black hole. While a black hole acts as an attractor, drawing in any matter that crosses the event horizon, a white hole acts as a source that ejects matter from its event horizon. The sign of the acceleration is invariant (unchanged) under time reversal, so both black and white holes attract matter. The only potential difference between them is in the behavior at the horizon. Black hole event horizons can only "suck up" matter, while white hole horizons ostensibly recede from any incoming matter at the local speed of light, so that the infalling matter never crosses. The infalling matter is then scattered and re-emitted at the death of the white hole, receding to infinity after having come close to the final singular point where the white hole is destroyed." [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole]
Hmmm.... How interesting it is to ponder the huge implications of these concepts for future Lost plotlines based on good vs. evil and light vs. dark allegiances, factions, conflicts, and war.... One distinct implication of matters raised above is that-- just as black and white holes may be related in a cyclical, time-reversed manner-- we ultimately learn that Jacob and MIB are two YIN/YANG sides of the same coin of the realm of reality.... And the giant sucking sound is MIB/unLOCKE/ Smokey and the whole of the dark side unHOLY TRINITY at work, sucking up to and recruiting candidates on the looming event horizon of the war between good and evil. At the same time, we see JACOB and the light side HOLY TRINITY eagerly and quite literally dying to save existence, working through death like a white hole, to scatter and re-emit the infalling and enfallen matter....
LIGHT SIDE HOLY TRINITY- DARK SIDE unHOLY TRINITY-
God/The Father/Osiris/Ra Satan/The Devil/Set
Christ/Jacob/Horus/LEMON Antichrist/MIB/Anubis/DAEMON
Holy Ghost/Taweret/Clear Healing Pool Smoke Monster/Ammit/Brown Pool
LIGHT SIDE 'REALITY GENERATORS'- DARK SIDE 'REALITY GENERATORS'-
White/'Ordinary' Matter Dark/Mirror Matter
White Holes Black Holes
Higgs Boson/God Particle Anti-Higgs Boson/Anti-God Particle
CP Symmetry, CP Violation, And The Looming War Of Good And Evil-
Black holes, white holes.... DAEMONS and LEMONS.... Are there really any proven light/dark, matter/antimatter mechanisms for achieving time reversal as we know it....? Fascinating results from decades of scientific inquiry yields a ringing and resounding YES! to this natural query. Inquiring minds will be interested to learn that research on CP Symmetry, CP Violation, and related phenomena provides an established basis for realizing the dream of reversing Time's Arrow:
"In
particle physics,
CP violation is a violation of the postulated
CP symmetry: the combination of
C symmetry and
P symmetry. CP symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry, or charge conjugation symmetry), and left and right were swapped (P symmetry, or parity symmetry).... Simply speaking, charge conjugation is a simple symmetry between particles and antiparticles, and so CP symmetry was proposed in 1957 by
Lev Landau as the true symmetry between matter and antimatter. In other words a process in which all particles are exchanged with their
antiparticles was assumed to be equivalent to the mirror image of the original process."
One mind-expansive implication of CP Symmetry is that our universe should therefore be comprised of roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which it clearly is not: Our known universe contains an overwhelming abundance of matter and very little antimatter. The discovery of CP Violation is a cornerstone in the foundation of our current understanding of the pronounced matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe:
Hmmm... so is the CP violation evidence of a prior light-side victory over the dark-side, in the battle of good and evil....? Does this not echo the epic struggle between forces headed by the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor in the classic Crisis On Infinite Earths? And will MIB/unLocke and the rest of the unHoly Trinity be looking to reverse that destiny through winning the looming war, and remaking the universe in their own dark, mirror/antimatter image? Is this even possible? Yes, read on, for the scientific basis for this chilling potential Lost plot twist:
"CPT symmetry is a fundamental symmetry of physical laws under transformations that involve the inversions of charge, parity and time simultaneously.... The implication of CPT symmetry is that a "mirror-image" of our universe — with all objects having their positions reflected by an imaginary plane (corresponding to a parity inversion), all momenta reversed (corresponding to a time inversion) and with all matter replaced by antimatter (corresponding to a charge inversion)— would evolve under exactly our physical laws. The CPT transformation turns our universe into its "mirror image" and vice versa. CPT symmetry is recognized to be a fundamental property of physical laws. In order to preserve this symmetry, every violation of the combined symmetry of two of its components (such as CP) must have a corresponding violation in the third component (such as T); in fact, mathematically, these are the same thing. Thus violations in T symmetry are often referred to as CP violations."
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPT_symmetry]
Whoa! Are Darlton revealing, in the sideways shift, a CPT transformation at work in the Lost Universe....?
Even more fascinating, from a TIME REVERSAL standpoint, is the accepted possibility of such a reversal and its effect in renaming particles as antiparticles, a phenomenon WHICH WE'RE NOW OBSERVING ON LOST, AS CANDIDATES ARE LOCKED IN/CLAIMED FOR ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER (unClaire, unSayid, etc.)
"It is important to stress that this time reversal violation is unrelated to the second law of thermodynamics, because due to the conservation of the CPT symmetry, the effect of time reversal is to rename particles as antiparticles and vice versa." [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-symmetry]
And Time Reversal has been linked to the WHITE HOLE phenomenon noted above:
"The time reversal of a black hole would be a hypothetical object known as a white hole. From the outside they appear similar. While a black hole has a beginning and is inescapable, a white hole has an ending and cannot be entered. The forward light-cones of a white hole are directed outward; and its backward light-cones are directed towards the center." [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-symmetry]
So we may indeed learn that Reversibility in Lost is associated with the 'light-side' operation of micro White Hole phenomena on the island, in conflict with and in contrast to 'dark-side' micro Black Hole phenomena (including Smokey). Hmmm... will unLocke hold training camps to help unClaire and unSayid learn to progress along the dark path of 'unlightenment', through death/rebirth cycles and heuristic practice in dark-side, DAEMONic shape-shifting....?
BARYON ASYMMETRY speaks not only to the fundamental distribution of matter/antimatter in the universe, but it also raises some intriguing questions involving our own existence and the fate of our cherished castaways on Lost:
"The baryon asymmetry problem in physics refers to the apparent fact that there is an imbalance in baryonic matter and antibaryonic matter in the universe. Neither the standard model of particle physics, nor the theory of general relativity provide an obvious explanation for why this should be so; and it is a natural assumption that the universe be neutral with all conserved charges. The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter; as such, there should have been total cancellation of both. In other words, protons should have cancelled with antiprotons, electrons with antielectrons, neutrons with antineutrons, and so on for all elementary particles. This would have resulted in a sea of photons in the universe with no matter. Since this is quite evidently not the case, after the Big Bang, physical laws must have acted differently for matter and antimatter." [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry]
One fascinating implication of Baryon Asymmetry is that there may be no universe at all, if there were no asymmetry in the first place, suggesting that Dialectical struggles between matter/antimatter (as well as good/evil?) may lie at the heart of our existence and that of the entire universe, as well.... The implication is clear.... without a war, and a winner, both sides will cancel each other out, nullifying the very fabric/tapestry of existence....! Are we doomed (or relieved!) to replay 'boom and bust' cycles of universe-al expansion and contraction, shifting endlessly back and forth from 'MATTER-ASYMMETRY' universes to 'ANTIMATTER-ASYMMETRY' universes....? And are we seeing just such a power struggle playing out writ small, on the Lost island, a looming war for the fundamental nature and constitution of the universe?
A second intriguing option suggested by Baryon Asymmetry research has deeply reverberating implications for remaining Lost plotlines and resolutions:
"Another possible explanation of the apparent baryon asymmetry is that there are regions of the universe in which matter is dominant, and other regions of the universe in which antimatter is dominant, and these are widely separated. The problem therefore becomes a matter/antimatter separation problem, rather than a creation imbalance problem. Antimatter atoms would appear from a distance indistinguishable from matter atoms, as both matter and antimatter atoms would produce light (photons) in the same way. Only in the border between a matter dominated region and an antimatter dominated region would the antimatter's presence be detectable, as only there would matter/antimatter annihilation (and the subsequent production of gamma radiation) occur.... At least one more major scientific study, called the
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, is planned that would, among other things, advance our capability of detecting very distant antimatter dominated regions....
Another possibilty is that antimatter dominated regions exist within the universe, but outside our
observable universe.
Inflationary cosmology models suggest that the there may be more to the universe than can be seen from the Earth, if only for the simple reason that the universe isn't old enough for light from the most distant parts of the universe to have reached us yet."
Hmmm.... Is it our perceived universe that is the real 'island', with our matter-based 'lightside' REGION of the universe floating like an island amidst a larger sea of matter- and antimatter-based regions, together comprising the whole universe...? And is the tropical Lost island a portal for moving among these various regions of the universe? Is this what unLocke means when he says he wants to go home? Does he want to return to his 'home' region of the universe, one comprised of antimatter, suited to his DAEMONic form as Smokey? Or is unLocke recruiting unClaire, unSayid, and other candidates to return with him to the dark Shadowlands of a Dark Matter Mirrorverse, lurking beneath the shadows of our everyday lives....
Time will tell....
Dr. Todd J. Hostager
______________________________________________________________________
ENDNOTES:
1. Please see my posting on "The Constant" for more information, at:
2. For more information on the Lighthouse of Alexandria, see:
3. For more information on the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), please see:
4. Please see my prior postings regarding a Bohm interpretation of Lost, including: