The ODI

NOTE: This is an old interview

Here is a fun little interview of Damon and Carlton about the Science of LOST and more!

Thanks to Karen for the heads up!

We fact-check the science and technology behind Lost every week and most of the time you guys get it right. How much time do you spend researching each episode, and where do you do your research? Do you have a panel of experts on speed dial?
Carlton Cuse: We do not have a panel of experts on speed dial, although we do have Greg Nations, who is our script coordinator, who is someone we will turn to who will track down specific facts. The internet is also a beautiful and wonderful thing, and we have our own areas of expertise. Damon is a real comic book geek and I'm a little bit more of a science geek. I took a couple of years of high school physics and my dad was an engineer. I think even though I maybe don't possess a deep science knowledge, I do feel like my brain kind of works a little bit in the way of, you know, does this seem like it makes sense or not, and then Damon and I will go and find an expert or some factual stuff to try to support what it is that we want to do narratively.
Damon Lindelof: We have an awesome production team in Hawaii, so if we send down a script that says "Faraday has equations scribbled all over the chalkboard behind him," that falls upon them and Jeremy Davies, the actor who plays Faraday—who is very method and has been reading a lot about physics and trying to understand it—[to execute] what it says on the script page.

How important is it for you to get the science right?
CC: The science needs to be right enough that we kind of create a sense of believability to the story telling.
DL: We function on Jurassic Park rules, which are, if you can convince me that a mosquito can bite a dinosaur and then get preserved in amber, and that the DNA will not degrade over all that period of time, then you can show me a cloned dinosaur and I won't call it a science-fiction movie. And, you know, we try to do the same thing on the show. If something highly unlikely occurs, we try to offer up some grounding in the actual physical world that we understand in an effort to explain it—except in the case of things that don't potentially have a scientific explanation, which is where the show begins to go into its own territory.
CC: But we're always trying to skirt that line between the two possible explanations, the scientific one or a mythical and magical one, and we are purposefully ambiguous about which one might be correct. Obviously, certain things fall into the science category and certain things fall more into the mystical category, and that just sort of depends on what story we're telling that week.

There's a lot of fan talk that any non-rational or fictional or magical explanation of the island's happenings is a completely unacceptable cop-out. So far, there are plausible scientific explanations for everything that's happening, so people have accepted what's going on. Does being called out by viewers (or the press) worry you?
DL: Well, first off, I would challenge that assertion, and say, how does Yemi walking out of the jungle, the deceased brother of Eko, have a scientific explanation? I guess you would argue that he doesn't walk out of the jungle, that this is all sort of happening in Eko's head, that it's a hallucination. Would that be the case, is that...

Full Article Here: Popular Mechanics