<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" The opening moments of Lost&amp;#039;s season six premiere, &amp;quot;LA X,&amp;quot; look eerily familiar: We&amp;#039;re back on Oceanic Flight 815. But something is off. Yes, reluctant hero Jack Shephard is still flirting with an Australian flight attendant and talking an anxious Rose through a patch of turbulence while her husband is in the bathroom, just as we saw in season one. Suddenly, the turbulence gets worse, and then ... it stops. Instead of breaking apart and crashing on a mysterious island, Oceanic Flight 815 stays intact. And that&amp;#039;s not all that&amp;#039;s different: Boone is on the plane, but Shannon isn&amp;#039;t. Instead of being branded unlucky by the numbers he used for his lottery win, Hurley is the luckiest man alive. And beneath the plane, the island where our favorite castaways have spent the last few seasons fighting Others and each other is now completely submerged. It only gets weirder from there. In the next scene, we&amp;#039;re back on the island, post-Jughead detonation, at the site of the Swan hatch. Somehow, when Juliet bludgeoned the nuke with a rock, it sent the castaways back to the present-day Swan site. And when she finally passes away, Miles &amp;quot;I talk to dead people&amp;quot; Straume is able to impart one last message to Sawyer from his dearly departed love: It worked. All together now: What the...? In order to understand Lost&amp;#039;s final season premiere, it&amp;#039;s necessary to go back to last season&amp;#039;s finale, &amp;quot;The Incident.&amp;quot; Daniel Faraday\u2014from the present day but, like the rest of the castaways, stuck in 1977 thanks to the island&amp;#039;s propensity to jump through time\u2014hatched a plan to rewrite history. If he used Jughead, the hydrogen bomb left on the island by the U.S. Army in the 1950s, to destroy the pocket of electromagnetism beneath the Swan hatch, that hatch would never be built. Then, the Dharma Initiative wouldn&amp;#039;t have to press a button every 108 minutes to release built-up electromagnetic energy and Desmond wouldn&amp;#039;t one day fail to push the button, which, in this universe, caused Oceanic Flight 815 to crash. Instead, the plane would land safely at LAX. In the twisted time travel world of Lost, Faraday was gunned down by his own mother, so Jack carried out his plan, dropping Jughead into the drill shaft at the Swan work site. And when Juliet got dragged inside, she did what an impact from a fall couldn&amp;#039;t: Hit the nuke with a rock until it went off. Dead Juliet was right: Faraday&amp;#039;s plan did work. And this is where Lost is on solid science ground. Like Fringe, the show is now diving headfirst into multiverse theory, where the river of time forks constantly into different universes. &amp;quot;According to this theory, our universe is a bubble of some sort, which is constantly expanding,&amp;quot; explains Michio Kaku, host of the Science Channel&amp;#039;s Sci-Fi Science and author of &amp;quot;Physics of the Impossible.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But there are other bubbles out there, floating above us. These other universes are invisible, since light passes below them.&amp;quot;  Until now, Lost has said that whatever happened, happened. You can&amp;#039;t change the past. And that&amp;#039;s also right, according to Novikov&amp;#039;s self-consistency principle. When the castaways detonated Jughead, they created another universe in which Oceanic 815 never crashed. But they didn&amp;#039;t alter their own past\u2014in fact, in some interpretations of quantum theory, they&amp;#039;re actually existing in multiple states at the same time. &amp;quot;If time forks into two rivers, then you have two parallel realities, which evolve independently of each other,&amp;quot; Kaku says. &amp;quot;Your own past is fixed, but you can meet copies of yourself in parallel universes in different time eras and then change your history. You can chance the past of the alternate reality that split off. It might also be possible that in these other realities, people who are dead in our reality are still alive in other universes\u2014so Elvis might still be alive in another reality.&amp;quot; In other words, the castaways simultaneously exist on the island, where they&amp;#039;re preparing for an epic battle between good and evil, and in a world where Jacob never touched them. Where they never crashed. Where they don&amp;#039;t know each other, as of yet. While Lost&amp;#039;s season premiere answered a lot of questions (oh, so that&amp;#039;s what the smoke monster is!) as always, it raised many more: Where is the home that un-Locke is so desperate to get to? What&amp;#039;s with the Lazarus act, Sayid? If this is destiny, will all the castaways be thrown together in the alternate reality as well? Still, one thing is clear\u2014we&amp;#039;re in for two very wild rides. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a5390/4344737/>