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" After four seasons following the harrowing exploits of the survivors of Oceanic flight 815 on and off their island, last night&amp;#039;s episode of Lost, &amp;quot;316,&amp;quot; dropped a huge piece of the jigsaw puzzle into the laps of the show&amp;#039;s devotees. Dharma Initiative scientists learned that unique pockets of electromagnetic energy exist at various points around the world, forming a network of tunnels through space-time. The Los Angeles-based station in which Mrs. Hawking and the castaways are standing, the Lamp Post, is itself constructed over one of these pockets. The most important gateway was a strange island, but efforts to find it proved futile--until one scientist decided to look for the island not where it was, but where it was going to be. By devising a series of equations, he was able to predict where the island would be at certain points in time, opening up windows that would allow people to get there. The island could not be found because it only appeared at certain points in space-time. This is the reason why the island appears and then disappears.  Is all this Hollywood mumbo-jumbo or is there any science to this delicious nonsense? The &amp;quot;electromagnetic&amp;quot; origin of these time-connecting passageways doesn&amp;#039;t make much sense scientifically (nor does having a huge pendulum mark one of the gateways, or the scenario that the survivors must duplicate the circumstances of their original plane crash), but what is feasible is that the Dharma scientists have stumbled on some &amp;quot;exotic matter&amp;quot; on the island. According to Einstein&amp;#039;s equations, exotic matter is a mysterious substance that has anti-gravitational properties-it falls up rather than down. In the past, scientists have unsuccessfully searched for exotic matter since it is believed that if any had existed on the Earth billions of years ago, it would have been repelled by gravity and floated off into outer space. But exotic matter is the Holy Grail of relativistic physics because it has an even more fantastic property: the ability to open gateways in the fabric of space and time. These gateways are called &amp;quot;wormholes,&amp;quot; and they connect two points in space and time. With enough exotic matter, one can travel back to any point in space or time. The scientists of the Dharma Initiative could have found enough exotic matter on the island, perhaps a meteorite, to create a laboratory-the Orchid Station-which can serve as the entrance to the wormhole. In principle, these portals can connect different points in space as well as time. For example, this would explain how an entire island can move through time. To make sense of Lost, think of time not as a superhighway, that unerringly takes you from one time to another, but more like a meandering river. According to Einstein, time is like Old Man River, speeding up and slowing down as it meanders through the cosmos. The new wrinkle on all this is that exotic matter can make the river of time form whirlpools and even fork into two rivers. When one enters the Orchid Station and enters the portal, one enters a whirlpool in time and is swept back into the past.  RELATED STORIES * EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Dae Kim Talks Time Travel with PM  * PLUS: Lost&amp;#039;s Time Travel Theories Become Clear  * SNEAK PEAK: 11 Geeked-Out Movies Coming in 2009  * DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD: Lost, Fringe, Lie to Me and More!   (Photograph by Mario Perez/ABC) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a12269/4304614/>