Last night on Lost, Ben moved the island—presumably thousands of miles. Could he actually do that, without huge accelerations that would obliterate all structures and kill all the people on the island? The surprising answer, in physics, is yes … sort of. The trick is that you don’t really move the island. Rather, you change its space-time connection to the rest of the Earth.

Space and time in relativity theory are quite flexible. Gravity is one manifestation of that. According to Einstein’s discovery, the presence of mass-energy warps space-time; what we perceive as gravity is just the curvature of space-time. That’s the Theory of General Relativity, now firmly established by experimental tests. The strange behavior of time and space (the fact that two twins traveling apart can experience different amounts of time, for example) are verified daily in our physics labs, using radioactive particles rather than twins. I’ve verified this myself.