Pure Purple Sky

Last night's pop-up episode of "The Constant" had a few nice reveals. One was something I had speculated right here in this very blog: that when Desmond initiated the fail-safe and the sky turned purple, it was the same phenomenon that Faraday created in his lab at Oxford.

The pop-up specifically mentioned the purple light. I have a few notes about this. It came out a few years ago that our sky is actually purple, but the cones in human eyes cannot detect such short wavelengths that are being scattered over such a large expanse, so we see a blue sky (honeybees and some birds see a purple sky, incidentally).

Soon after Faraday landed on the island, he mentioned the light scatters differently. This could be after-effects of the fail-safe. The fact that humans were able, for a short time, to see the purple sky, must have meant either the blue waves in the sky did not scatter over the purple, allowing us to see all purple, or the purple waves were longer. Because we know light is electromagnetic radiation, then I think it's obvious that when an electromagnetic pulse was release, it amplified the wavelengths of light in the sky, effectively stretching the purple waves and allowing them to be seen by humans. Soon after the pulse, they shortened and the sky was again blue.

The physical explanation for the blueness of the sky is attributed to the work of Lord Rayleigh in the 19th century. Rayleigh scattering, a phenomenon named after him, is the scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light. It is interesting to note that in 1879 he was appointed to follow James Clerk Maxwell as Professor of Experimental Physics and Head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Maxwell is a name given in the Lostverse to the "Maxwell Group," a group that paid for the expedition to find the Black Rock ship in the find815.com game.

So, it follows that in order to unstick your consciousness in time, you need to alter the electromagnetic spectrum in a way that makes the short spectrum longer. And apparently this will happen if the device is set to oscillate at 11 Hertz.

A few brief words on Hertz: Wikipedia says: Heinrich Hertz, through experimentation, proved that transverse free space electromagnetic waves can travel over some distance. This had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday. So two more mentions of Maxwell and Faraday. I think we're getting somewhere.

With his apparatus configuration, the electric and magnetic fields would radiate away from the wires as traverse waves. Hertz had positioned the oscillator about 12 meters from a zinc reflecting plate to produce standing waves.

It's funny that Hertz is quoted saying about his experiments -- which paved the way for radio and radar -- "It's of no use whatsoever." Hertz died at age 36, much like Ferris at age 37.

So Hertzian radiation, better known as radio waves, should also be considered important in the Desmond-Faraday time travel experiment. Radio waves, like electromagnetism, are an important theme in Lost. Sayid is always trying to get some radio to work. I wonder what would happen if we got Sayid and Faraday together for some type of radio magnetism experiment?