Imaginary Space & Time (Observation)
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By WhatTheFoucault
- Imaginary Space & Time (Observation)
- Created: Mar 2, 2008
- Last updated: Aug 14, 2008
- After episode: 3.22: Through The Looking Glass
- Status: Current
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I know this is already starting to make its way around the message boards, but this hint is a critical clue to the overall storyline of Lost. I believe some people have already posted screen shots, but if you look closely at Faraday’s journal, you see multiple references to “Imaginary Space & Time.” Now, I’ve been researching this for a couple days now, and there just doesn’t seem to be much explanation out there. (Smart people, this is your cue to jump in and educate us.) This is a direct quote from Wikipedia (I know, not the best source ever):
Imaginary time is difficult to visualize. If we imagine “regular time” as a horizontal line with “past” on one side and “future” on the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in the complex plane. However, imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up—it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience. In essence, imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space.
Now, I wish I was smart and knew what that meant, but alas, I am no scientist. All I know is that this seems to fit with what is happening.
My understanding is this (note, I could be wrong, but this is how I interpret that)…
We see time as running continuously in a straight line. In theory, there are multiple, infinite universes that exist parallel to ours. Basically, pretend you have 3 points in time/space: A is where you are right now. B and C are both points at the same time, but are in different universes. Now, starting at point A, your path in time could go to universe B or universe C, depending on what happens at point A. If you were to imagine time as an axis, you could say that B and C are both at the same point in time, but at different distances from the axis (that is, they are different ‘places’). In this way, you could imagine the different universes being ‘perpendicular’ to time. Theoretically, both universes exist and our reality chooses one; an infinite number of universes exist for every possible event, but we only follow one of the paths. Depending on what happened at point A, your path could be A-B or A-C, but either way, it would seem like time is advancing normally for each.
Now, I don’t know how well this addresses imaginary time, but that’s what I make of the ‘perpendicular to time’ idea. But I hope that made sense.
As this relates to Desmond and Daniel, here’s what I see:
Reality already exists for every point in time, in the future and the past, but our consciousness only exists at a specific point in time. In Daniel’s experiment, he was able to move someone’s consciousness to a different, already-existent point in time. The same could be true about universes. Our consciousness could exist in one universe, but it chooses one universe to exist in at any point in time.
Reading what I just wrote, it sounds really confusing, so I hope that’s at least a little understandable.
I think you guys are losing track of the fact that this is fiction. You might as well be discussing how Star Trek’s warp engines work. They don’t. And it isn’t important to the story.