<remysun2000@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:c91bbad7-022e-4f7b-ae6d-07712ffe68ac@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The more I think about it, the producers have dismissed time travel.
> They have not dismissed taking the concepts of Einstein's Theory of
> Relativity to new conclusions. Forgive me if my extrapolation feels
> half baked, and if you really knowthis better than I do, please share
> your thoughts.
>
> Relativity of simultaneity basically says: "It is impossible to say in
> an absolute sense whether two events occur at the same time if those
> events are separated in space." (Wikipedia)
The phrase "in an absolute sense" is im****tant here.
>
> So you have on the island and off. Desmond finds himself observing at
> two time simultaneously. To him, it's the same time, because he keeps
> switching consciousness back and forth.
As long as he's still on the same planet, the time differences would be
extremely small -- fractions of a second.
>
> "Einstein's special theory demonstrates that there are occasions when
> there is no 'correct' answer, where no observer has a privileged
> status, and all the observers can claim to be 'correct' even if their
> ordering of events disagree with each other."
Yes, but you have to understand how small the differences would be, if on
the same planet. We're talking about milliseconds or even microseconds.
Einstein's famous example involved a train which while running along its
track was struck by lightning at both front and rear ends, the lightning
also striking the rails. To an observer standing on the station as this
happened, the two lightning strikes were simultaneous, because he saw both
at exactly the same time as the exact middle of the train went past -- and
light travels at a constant speed.
But to an observer in the middle of the moving train, the events were not
simultaneous -- the front end was struck first, because the light from
that
strike had a shorter distance to travel (from the point at which the rails
were struck) and light still travels at a constant speed, *regardless* of
the motion of the observer.
The two observers were on different "grids," as Einstein called them --
the
moving train on one grid and the railroad station on the other, and
neither
grid is any more valid as a reference than the other. That's one of the
things that relativity is all about. Therefore Einstein said there was
really no such thing as simultaneity, because neither time nor space are
constant. Only the speed of light is constant. That is why it's
abbreviated
as c, for example in Einstein's famous equation, E = mc^2.
But you have to realize that regardless of which way grids are moving and
how fast they're moving, the time difference between them can't be greater
than the time it would take light to travel the distance between them.
Even
for events occurring at the opposite ends of the earth, the time
difference
couldn't be more than about 1/15 of a second.
>
> That is why Desmond needs a constant-- Penny. It is through her that
> he can establish a frame of reference that will keep him from going
> insane from not having any correct answer to make sense of.
That "constant" business as described in Lost is nothing but gobbledegook.
Don't waste time trying to make any sense out of it, because there isn't
any
sense in it.
Neil
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