Lost: Happily Ever After....or not???

Another fantastic episode of Lost this week as we delve into Happily Ever After, Desmond episodes are always so interesting and exciting. He has always been a favorite character of mine and the rest of the fan base, and what is the first thing that happens to him when he comes back, he’s put in a box with two electromagnetic coils. I keep wondering if that thing has a name.
We soon find out that it puts his consciousness into the alt reality. Or does it? He doesn’t seem to be aware right away of what’s going on or of the real time line. We soon learn he is not married to Penny or anyone else, and works for Widmore. Not only does he work for him, he actually likes him, and Widmore likes him back!!! Of all the alternate reality’s that we have seen so far, this is the one that I would say is the most complete opposite of how the person is in the real time line.
But the one thing that is still getting to me after all this time really popped up with this episode. THE TIME LINE!!!
If the incident sunk the island in 1977 as we have been led to believe this whole time then how in the world did Widmore get off that Island, same with Eloise, and Daniel since she was pregnant with him at the time. They should not be alive if the island just sunk! Of course we don’t know really if it took some time to sink of if it just sunk.
What it looked like to me was that when the bomb went off near the electromagnetic energy, the island flashed to the bottom of the ocean. After all what we saw in the premiere was an island that looked a lot like it did when it was above ground, just a little wetter.
In fact over the course of the season we have seen a lot of people that have been off island alive in the real world when they should have been nice and dead on the island because of the incident if it happened in a flash like I am supposing, this list also includes Ethan Goodspeed/Rom and Benjamin Linus.
I have a few theories as to why this is occurring, and they had better answer this question I have on the time line.
1. the island did not immediately sink when the bomb went off bet went on a slow sinking kind of like the titanic, but that doesn’t explain how we saw everything at the bottom of the ocean in near perfect condition.
2. There is a mention on the swan hatch door of another incident or event in 1985. it doesn’t say what happened but perhaps because a new incident happened in 1977, something different and worse happened in 1985 to sink the island. Far off but its something.
3. In the orientation video for the swan Candle seemed to indicate that the incident occurred shortly after the Swan station began operations, but as we saw it happened during the construction process. However it is worth noting as Lostpedia does that “Pierre Chang alluded to (that the station was "originally" a laboratory used for research), the Swan's protocol was established during the construction of the Swan itself due to the workers drilling into the magnetic energy field. This would seem to suggest that there wasn't even a brief period of time that the Swan was used for its original research purpose. However, it's not clear yet whether or not this is the same mysterious Incident that Chang spoke of.”
So what actually happened? Did changing the time of the incident affect the timeline of the island? Because it happened during construction things were worse off?? That still doesn’t explain how people who should have been killed in the explosion and or sinking of the island are still alive. Any ideas??
Another problem Charlie’s explanation of his vision that he saw in the plane while chocking. He says he saw Kate two rows in front of him before hand, but Kate is at no time that close to him, picky I know, but still. CONTINUTIY ERROR.
I loved that it was Charlie’s hand that triggered Desmond’s flash of the island and finally discovering what was going on. It made me believe the more flashes he got that this time line does matter. Desmond now has a plan, and in this reality he has the resources to go through with the plan. I now see him going to ever 815er and trying to convince them that this is not where they all belong. I’m not sure what else he can do, but perhaps now that his two selves seem to be linked he will slowly discover what he needs to do.
It helps that he ran into a lot of people in his alt reality, and the Eloise interaction was the most interesting, she says the iconic words, “What ever happened, happened” of course this is in regards to him not getting drive shaft, but still. Then she goes all time cop mode, and it makes me wonder does she have the same position that she did in the original reality? How did she get that position in the first place? Is it a gift that Jacob gave her? That Widmore is the leader and she is the time cop? Or what ever we want to call it.
I love that Daniel is a musician in this reality, in some ways it fulfills his promise that he can do both math and music at the same time. we get his notebook once again, and his explanation of the flashes, plus the actual words on paper “Imaginary time” which is what I firmly believe we are dealing with now.
And now a “brief” definition of Imaginary Time from Wikipedia, there is no dictionary definition
In quantum mechanics
Imaginary time is obtained from real time via a Wick rotation by in the complex plane: . It can be shown that at finite temperature T, the Green's functions are periodic in imaginary time with a period of . Therefore their Fourier transforms contain only a discrete set of frequencies called Matsubara frequencies. Another way to see the connection between statistical mechanics and quantum field is to consider the transition amplitude between an initial state I and a final state F. H is the Hamiltonian of the system. If we compare this with the partition function we see that to get the partition function from the transition amplitudes we can replace , set F = I = n and sum over n. This way we don't have to do twice the work by evaluating both the statistical properties and the transition amplitudes. Finally by using a Wick rotation one can show that the Euclidean quantum field theoryin (D + 1)-dimensional spacetime is nothing but quantum statistical mechanics in D-dimensional space.
[edit]In cosmology
One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds? Stephen Hawking
Imaginary time is also used in cosmology. It is used to describe models of the universe in physical cosmology. Stephen Hawkingpopularized the concept of imaginary time in his book A Brief History of Time.


The relationship of real and imaginary time can be visualised as perpendicular axes of direction.
Imaginary time is difficult to visualize. If we imagine "regular time" as a horizontal line running between "past" in one direction and "future" in the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in thecomplex plane. However, imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up — it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience. In essence, imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space.
The concept is useful in cosmology because it can help smooth out gravitational singularities in models of the universe (see Hartle-Hawking state). Singularities pose a problem for physicists because these are areas where known physical laws do not apply. The Big Bang, for example, appears as a singularity in "regular time." But when visualized with imaginary time, the singularity is removed and the Big Bang functions like any other point in spacetime.
Does anyone understand that? The most important part is this: Imaginary time is difficult to visualize. If we imagine "regular time" as a horizontal line running between "past" in one direction and "future" in the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in thecomplex plane. However, imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up — it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience. In essence, imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space.
The science lesson is now over, now on to the heart strings part of this episode. PENNY!!!! I was so thankful they brought her back, hey they brought dominic back to lost from Flash Forward, thy could by well bring Sonya Wagner back as well…and they did. Thank you ABC for that, now bring back Pushing Daisies as well. It wasn’t as emotional of a scene as the one in the constant, but it was as fulfilling, because it brought everything together and brought us back to the stadium, the same place where Desmond met Jack. It also seemed to make the final connections between the alt realtiy and the real time line. After he touched Penny’s hand he was flung back to the real time line, and he knew everything and trusted Widmore for the first time in his life. He even took his hand to get up. Yes, Nancy Drew, your hands popped again, but for me they are a symbol of trusting someone to touch them, that is all.
At the very end of the episode however I have a problem. Something is very very wrong with Desmond. He agrees to go with Sayid, willingly. When Desmond should know not to trust him? Why does he do that? In an interview Henry Ian Cusiak says that he believes Desmond went with him, because Desmond has a purpose now, and believes that whatever he does will lead him to that. I’m not so sure on that, it just seems that Desmond is WAY too trusting at the end of this episode, and something just makes me feel that him going with Sayid is a very bad thing.
Next episode: Everyone Loves Hugo!! This should be interesting