Filed under: tv
In the finale to season 4 of TV show Lost, we get several hints as to what gives the island its strange properties (warning, some spoilers ahead), specifically, the presence of negatively-charged exotic matter in the Orchid Station. According to recent experimental estimates, the universe is composed of 75% dark energy, 20% dark matter, and 5% matter/antimatter. Under the standard laws of physics, for every normal matter particle there exists a corresponding antiparticle. Exotic matter can be created by combining a particle with its antiparticle. This has been done in the case of electrons and positrons, which when combined create a short-lived, hydrogen-like atom positronium. Exotic matter is theorized to possess qualities like negative mass or anti-gravity. Moreover, in current quantum models of wormholes in space-time, exotic matter may be used to stabilize a wormhole, as well as expand or contract it, by creating an exotic matter ball in the hole’s mouth. Expanded sufficiently, it could be used to move an island through space-time, like the numbered rabbits seemed to have been moved in an earlier Orchid Station video. The white rabbits/wormholes also seem to serve as a parallel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, as Alice’s adventures start by going down the rabbit hole, where she falls for an unusually long period of time, and instead of suffering the fatal effects of gravity, emerges in a different world. Other curious white rabbit parallels include how one of the helicopter pilots returning the Oceanic 6 has a lucky rabbit’s foot, just like the one on the keychain to the car Hurley’s father gives his son in the same episode (4×12), stranger still is the fact that the keychain for the van on the island (3×10) also had a rabbit’s foot. Further, there is a picture of the White Rabbit from the Alice books on the wall of Aaron’s room when Kate sees Claire. Wormholes can go a long way to explaining how certain characters can see and hear dead people, know the future, and not age over decades.
White holes and wormholes, Colorado.edu
Exotic matter-antimatter molecule created, Wired.com
