Physicist: Einstein Would Approve of Moving the Island on Lost
How did Ben make the island "disappear" in last night's season finale? It's all relativity, argues a top professor who even uses Lost in his classes. Wormholes, 305-degree bearings, the Casimir effect—it all checks out with quantum mechanics, and could explain a lot for next season.
Last night on Lost, Ben moved the island—presumably thousands of miles. Could he actually do that, without huge accelerations that would obliterate all structures and kill all the people on the island? The surprising answer, in physics, is yes ... sort of. The trick is that you don't really move the island. Rather, you change its space-time connection to the rest of the Earth.
Space and time in relativity theory are quite flexible. Gravity is one manifestation of that. According to Einstein's discovery, the presence of mass-energy warps space-time; what we perceive as gravity is just the curvature of space-time.
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