LOST physics explained
June 3, 2008 | 5:30 am
For all practical purposes, making an island vanish into thin air doesn’t seem possible. Neither do the dead reappearing or the weird split-personality time warp. But the hit TV show LOST, makes of these things possible thanks to some fancy physics.
In the LOST season finale last week, we learned that the existence of exotic matter on the island created a Casmir effect. While it sounded far fetched, quantum physicists have theorized that the Casmir effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow travel at speeds faster than light. This could explain all of the out of place space/time phenomena that occurs on the island, and the mystery surrounding the island itself.
The writers at Popular Mechanics seem to be fans of the show also, and have devoted several articles to the science behind the show, particularly in the season finale. Read them here and here.
Rhianna Wisniewski
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June 27th, 2008 at 11:56 am
The exotic matter is also a black body. This will explain the “Purple Sky Event/s” that have occured. In physics there is something called an Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This occurs when an ideal black body emits radiation with infinite power. A black body is an object that absorbs all light that falls on it and electromagnetic radiation is neither passes through it or is reflected. Because no light is reflected or transmitted the object appears black when it is cold. When the object is hot it becomes a perfect source of thermal radiation. Therefore, the exotic matter is kept cold so as not to emit the thermal radition. When the thermal radiation was emited in the Purple Sky Event it was actually an Ultraviolet Catastrophe. Perhaps not entering the numbers into the computer and/or turning the wheel in the ice cave exposed the exotic matter causing both the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the opening of the wormhole into the Closed Timelike Curve.