Dharma Initiative, Station 6: The Orchid

[Andrew D. Gable]

Talking about the video on YouTube (and the Season 3 DVD, I'm told). Don't have a link handy, but it's easy enough to find on the Net. It's reputedly a sort of preview for Season 4, maybe a new hatch found this year.

What do you think about this station? The main question I have is if this is a different station, why is Dr. Hallowax (as he's known now) wearing a lab coat with the Swan's logo on it? My personal opinion is that the two were related stations, perhaps the Orchid was that section of the Swan that was sealed off (where all the magnetism was coming from). As to this "shift" thing mentioned in the video once the rabbit starts getting weird, perhaps the 108 minute thing in the Swan was related to this. Sort of an upper limit to the shift or something? Either way, the video definitely seems to be pushing some sort of Swan/Orchid thing, when this is paired with some of the images below.

There's a few quick flashes of different images scattered throughout. A building (I think it's the one Hanso was in in the Swan video, my fiancee thinks it was the apartment building Locke's dad lived in)... a bearded man (I think it was part of the husband-and-wife team that founded Dharma), who looked like he was holding a rabbit... the "God loves you as He loved Jacob" screen from the brainwashing session in S3... and several upside-down shots of a bicyclist riding through Otherville (my fiancee thinks it was the grounds of Hurley's asylum).

Did anyone notice a falling object that passes through the screen directly beside Hallowax (above the trashcan-looking thing) right before the rabbit does its funky thing? I can't tell if it was supposed to be an object, or if it was an artifact on the film.

Last bit - he mentions the Casimir Effect on it. Can someone tell me in English what this is? I looked it up on Wikipedia but it was a bunch of hyper-scientific gobbledygook that was way over my head.

 

[Shade]

Wow! Thanks for sharing.

I found these bits telling:

Exotic matter with negative energy density is required to stabilize a wormhole.[6] Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever[7] pointed out that the quantum mechanics of the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time, and suggested that negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel.

A similar analysis can be used to explain Hawking radiation that causes the slow "evaporation" of black holes (although this is generally visualized as the escape of one particle from a virtual particle-antiparticle pair, the other particle having been captured by the black hole).

So the island may be a negative space-time region, essentially a black hole. And the slow evaporation allows people to escape, and perhaps Smoky/Abaddon is the attempt to correct the anomaly.

Mind-blowing!

 

[physics_ninja]

From Wise Geek

The Casimir effect refers to the tiny attractive force that appears between two uncharged plates in a vacuum. This Casimir force is only measurable when the plates are extremely close together (several atomic diameters).


The attractive force occurs because, as quantum theory indicates, even a so-called vacuum contains a multitude of virtual electromagnetic particles and anti-particles in a continuous state of fluctuation. This is known as the vacuum energy. Because the gap between the plates constrains the possible wavelengths of the virtual particle pairs, there are fewer virtual particles within the space between the plates relative to the space outside them. This means the energy density between the plates is less than that of the energy density of the surrounding space, creating a negative pressure which pulls the plates together ever so slightly.

There is a little bit more detail on the site itself.

In plain English:

Even in a vacuum, particles are appearing and disappearing all of the time. Because the space between the plates is so small, there are fewer particles appearing inside the gap than outside the gap. The higher "pressure" outside causes the plates to push together.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

In re: the Casimir effect and time-travel, I think that pretty much all of the island's mysteries will ultimately boil down to its strange (geophysical?) electromagnetic phenomena. The Casimir effect is connected to electromagnetism; the people's enhanced healing might be an electromagnetic phenomenon; we've got all the stuff from the Find 815 ARG (for those that have played/watched it) that seem to tie in with electromagnetic phenomena.

Even Miles with his so-called paranormal senses might be tied in with electromagnetism (if he's somehow sensitive to Kirlian fields or something- that vacuum device he used seemed like a Kirlian device to me).

 

[Shayuri]

Yeah, but are ghosts just electromagnetic phenomena?

The white thing that falls in the video is some little box that was on the shelf the rabbit appears on. The implication is that the rabbit displaced it when it appeared there, I think.

It's what alerts Halloway to its presence.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

Even Miles with his so-called paranormal senses might be tied in with electromagnetism (if he's somehow sensitive to Kirlian fields

Hmm, I suddenly had a brainstorm about whether there's a possibility that Kirlian energy and perception of auras ties into the whole "good/evil" thing of the Others and, somewhat more likely, maybe the power that that Asian girl who gave Jack has tattoo had? Hey, that episode has to have SOME point.

 

[RichCsigs]

First: here's a link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bTvAUVPyLI

Second: This is actually the cleaned up version of a video shown at San Diego Comic Con this past summer. The main differences being: the falling object makes a banging sound when it falls, Dr. Hallowax drops an f*bomb instead of "the hell?" and an alarm goes off when the second rabbit appears that sounds exactly like the "punch in the numbers" alarm in the swan. This video is also online, but it's a video camera shot of the screen from the audience so the sound isn't as good and you miss things over peoples laughter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZlkVW5XiqU

Third: I believe this will end up being the station that is crossed out on the blast door map (in the top left area). You'll notice next to it, outside the octagon, it says "from following ah/dmg incident" then "but could be #6"

Also, has anyone noticed that the guy who stars in all these videos has a different name in each video?