By Michio KakuSomething very strange is going down on the island. People suddenly appear out of nowhere, then vanish. A doctor is found dead, a day before he is actually killed. And finally, the entire island itself suddenly vanishes into thin air.
With space and time turned into a pretzel every week, you know that this is not your ordinary Robinson Crusoe adventure. That's one reason why Lost has made addicts out of millions of loyal viewers—and why I've advised the Popular Mechanics team for their "Lost Watch" on more than one occasion.
In last night's season finale, a video tape finally reveals the most scientific secret behind the series. There is a top secret laboratory on the island, the Orchid Station, in which a "pocket of exotic matter" was discovered that has created a kind of "Casimir effect" that has warped "four dimensional space-time." But is this all Hollywood mumbo-jumbo? Actually, there's a kernel of truth to all this techno-babble.
A pocket of "exotic matter," if it exists, would have truly remarkable properties. First of all, it would fall up rather than down. It would have anti-gravitational properties, so that, if you held it in your hand, it would rise and float into outer space.
But remarkably, it might also rip the fabric of space and time. For example, both Shakespeare and Isaac Newton adopted the picture that all the world is a stage, and we are actors making our entrances and exits. But then Einstein showed that the stage of space and time is not empty and flat, but actually curved, so that any actor walking across the warped stage would feel a "force" (i.e. gravity) tugging it to the left and right, like a drunken sailor.
The new wrinkle on all of this is that exotic matter, if it exists, could allow for trap doors in the stage of space-time. People can suddenly fall through these trap doors and re-appear in a different space and time, like the characters on Lost (particularly Ben). These are "wormholes," or shortcuts through space-time. The simplest example of a wormhole would be Alice's "Looking Glass." Another example would be a folded sheet of paper: By punching a hole in the folded paper, you can show that a wormhole is the shortest distance between two points. (So the Orchid Station was probably built around a meteorite made of exotic matter that hit the island.)
But unlike exotic matter, negative energy has actually been created in the laboratory. It was first predicted to exist by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir in 1948, and actually measured in 1958. For example, two uncharged parallel metal plates would normally be stationary. This is a state of zero energy. But Casimir showed that quantum effects within the vacuum push the two plates together. Since you have extracted energy from a system with zero energy, you have created negative energy. However, the Casimir effect is very tiny; in the experiment, the force was only 1/30,000 the weight of an ant. So all the bizarre electromagnetic disturbances in Lost are due to somehow creating a large Casimir effect with electric plates.
But what would a wormhole machine that can bend space and time into a pretzel look like? It would be truly gigantic. First, you would need the equivalent of a black hole to create a hole in space, and then negative energy or exotic matter to stabilize the hole so it didn't collapse on itself. The amount of exotic matter necessary to build a time machine would be about the mass of Jupiter. So the machine, instead of moving just the island, might have unintended consequences, such as actually eating up the entire earth!
Original here
Easily one of the best-known cast members of all time, original player John Belushi also became a wildly successful film actor. On his thirtieth birthday in 1979, Belushi had the number one album (The Blues Brothers: Briefcase Full of Blues), the number one movie (Animal House) and was the star of the highest-rated late night television show (SNL). Of course, Belushi was equally well known for his drug and alcohol indulgences. In a sketch called “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” which aired in 1978, John Belushi plays an elderly version of himself, visiting the graves of his fellow cast members. ‘’They all thought I’d be the first to go,'’ he gloats. ‘’I was one of those live-fast, die-young, leave-a-good-looking-corpse types, you know. But I guess they were wrong.'’ Belushi died of a drug overdose at the famous Chateau Marmont hotel. The lethal dose of cocaine and heroin was given to him by backup singer and notorious groupie Cathy Smith. Years later, Smith would serve prison time for her involvement in his death, among other crimes.
Vance joined the SNL cast for the historically disappointing 1985 season and became the first African-American female repertory player. She received little screen time and was often blatantly typecast. One of her more famous recurring characters was Cabrini Green Jackson, a professional teenage mother who gave advice on pregnancy. Frustrated by her demeaning characters, Vance left at the end of her first season. The majority of the rest of the cast was fired shortly after she left due to poor ratings. Four years after she left the show, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went into remission and created a skit based on her experiences. Unfortunately, the cancer returned and she died in 1993 at the age of 35. 
Following the departure of the original cast and Lorne Michaels before the 1980-81 season, temporary replacement producer Jean Doumanian hand picked Charles Rocket to be the breakout star of the new Saturday Night Live. Billed as a combination of Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, Rocket appeared in more sketches than any other male cast member that season and even hosted Weekend Update. During a sketch in the middle of the season, Rocket said the most notorious obscenity on live television and soon was fired, as was Doumanian and the bulk of the unpopular cast.
So this Hate By Numbers gig was coming along pretty nicely. I knew the deal. I’d search cable news clips until I found something that made me want to shout things at my computer. Then I wrote those things down. But last Wednesday, my friend 
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