LOST: He’s Our You- The Time Paradox Theories of Einstein, Hawking, Doc Brown and Sayid Jarrah?

Posted by ScuzzBuster

March 26, 2009

Those who have this overwhelming urge to shoot a 12-year old boy had the chance to live vicariously through Naveen Andrews Wednesday night. Speaking from a strictly personal viewpoint I rarely have the urge to pump bullets into a 12-year old with the small but notable exception of my own son. However for the sake of my family and personal freedom I generally resist. In this case however, finding out how this shooting of a minor will turn out should be quite a ride.

He’s Our You marked yet another step in season 5 toward traditional Lost story-telling interspersing flashbacks with present day events. In this case, present day is 1977. Unfortunately for older and wiser Sayid he hasn’t had the benefit of Faraday’s lectures on the inability of anyone to change the past. Had Sayid felt that those type of odds were stacked against him he probably would have been more bold and put the bullet in the head of young Ben Linus.

However, I built myself up for a disappointment by being genuinely shocked by Sayid’s actions. It was outrage in the first couple of moments but it quickly turned to evil satisfaction in the gunning down of the scumbag Linus over 30 years prior to him being the sniveling little weasel that we know and hate now.

We know that next week that he’s not dead because we’ve been watching the middle-aged Linus walk around manipulating our castaways for the past 3 seasons. Part of me really wants to see how Lost would handle a genuine bona fide time travel paradox. First, it would be an interesting thing to address. Second, by an odd coincidence no more than 48 hours prior to He’s Our You airing I had just completed the chapter on time paradox in Michio Kaku’s fascinating book on string theory called Parallel Worlds. What Sayid was attempting to create is called a “Bilker’s Paradox.” This where a person that travels backward in time does something in the past that would make the future impossible thereby creating a paradox.

Even though by all known laws of physics time travel should be possible (though extremely difficult) the multitude of paradoxes that it can create are the thing that keep physicists up at night. In this case, if Ben Linus dies of a gunshot wound at age 12 the vast majority if not all of what we have witnessed for the past 4 seasons becomes impossible.

Since by all rights time travel is indeed possible, there are several serious theories on how time travel paradoxes are prevented within the laws of the universe. Since one of the aspects of string theory allows for the possibility that there are alternate realities “vibrating” on the strings of the constituent particle “strings” of the reality we experience, one of the leading paradox theories is that at any divergence in events from the regular flow of events happens that an alternate reality is created. So basically, a parallel universe would exist where indeed, Ben Linus died at age 12.

One of the most interesting time travel paradox articles I ever read was in issue of the sci-fi mag Starlog about 20 years ago about the movie Back to the Future. The article posed an interesting possibility about the alternate future created by Marty Mcfly’s excursion into the past and how the only explanation was an “alternate universe” solution. It proposed that there were really two Marty McFly’s and the movie we saw was just one side of the story. In the alternate reality we saw him come back to at the end of the movie things had changed. Doc Brown wore a bullet proof vest and lived while Marty’s parents went from geeky losers to successful, cool people. Since we know that this “alternate” Doc Brown was aware of Marty’s travel into the past, he would obviously have wanted to spare Marty the hassle of almost negating his existence in 1955, so the Doc Brown at the end of the film (and the one in the next two films) who had always known the “successful parents” Marty deliberately packed extra plutonium in the DeLorean so Marty could immediately zip back to 1985 without having to take the risk. This is where it gets tricky.

Since Marty immediately comes back to 1985 thanks to Doc Brown planning for the inadvertent trip, he never gets involved with his parents meeting. His mother never gets a crush on him, and worst of all, George McFly never faces down Biff Tannen. What does this mean? It means that Marty–now we’re talking about the Marty that grew up with the kick-ass cool parents in Doc Brown’s alternate future–arrives home that night to find out that his father has transformed into a geeky, greasy loser under the thumb of Biff while his mother is a fat alcoholic. And worst of all, the car’s wrecked and he can’t go to the lake that weekend with Jennifer. As the Starlog article so eloquently put it, no wonder we saw the OTHER Marty’s story. It is an interesting speculation if nothing else.

One of the other theories of time travel paradox prevention is the less popular but still intriguing idea that the universe would prevent any action from occurring that would create a paradox. Igor Novikov, a Russian cosmologist proposed this theory basically chalking it up to an as yet undiscovered law of physics. This theory is less popular because of the devastating implications it has to the theory of free will and other physicists like Stephen Hawking really resist that implication. How could an unseen “force” prevent you from taking action, especially if you were really intent on performing that action, as Sayid obviously was when he gunned down an innocent 12-year old boy for the sole reason that he knew the boy would grow up to be a monster.

I actually feel that Novikov’s theory is more reasonable than it sounds and it may be overreaction to assume it means lack of free will. To support this, I point to another outstanding author, Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series of books. I believe it was in Adams’ Life, the Universe and Everything where he put forth the fact that time travel paradoxes were impossible not because of an invisible “force,” but because time was simply relative to itself. Everything that ever happened or will happen has already happened and all events that ever happened or will all intertwine with each other to create the web of events to begin with. So if you deliberately traveled back in time to create a paradox you would absolutely positively fail because everything has already happened and obviously there are no paradoxes. Of course in the end, this all leads to the two heroes in the book chasing a sofa through a meadow on prehistoric Earth.

This theory is basically what Faraday told Sawyer and the others earlier this season even though he obviously tried desperately to warn Charlotte not to return to the island and did sneak an “earlier” meeting with Desmond at the hatch.

Well, I’d like to address more Lost issues this week, but I think I’ve used all my words on Time Travel issues and great 1980’s movies. He’s Our You was a damned smashing episode in any case..

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