Desmond is special. Or at least that's what we've been hearing since he made his miraculous reappearance after blowing the Hatch at the end of Season Two. In last night's episode, "Happily Ever After," we found out why—sort of. Our favorite Scotsman has been brought back to the island by father-in-law Widmore, who wants to stop Fake Locke from escaping to the outside world. "[Desmond is] the only person I'm aware of in the world who has survived a catastrophic electromagnetic event," Widmore tells Jin. "I need to know if he can do it again, or we all die."

Widmore has set up a test room with two solenoid coils near Hydra Island's generating station. He puts an understandably reluctant Desmond between them. "Don't worry," Widmore says. "If what I've heard about you is true, you'll be just fine." (Nevermind the guy who went in to check something before the test and accidentally got fried.) Widmore turns on the power. The coils heat up, and Desmond screams in pain. In the generating station, a computer shows "Gauss field phasing adjustment for coil form deterioration" with electromagnetic fields counting down from 200 EMF to around 150. Gauges show a magnetic flux density from 170 gauss up to 200. And there's an electromagnetic radiation frequency that starts at 120 pHz and goes up to 200. Desmond collapses—and wakes up in the alternate universe. What's more, sitting inside an MRI in the alternate universe causes this Desmond to access memories or visions of his life in the other universe—so just as the guy could jump between different points of time with his mind in season three, he can now jump between universes mentally.

It's all very flashy—all very Lost. But just what, exactly, does this all electromagnet stuff mean in a scientific sense?

Electromagnets are just what they sound like: Magnets powered by electricity. But these magnets aren't permanent, like the ones on your fridge; once the electricity turns off, so does the magnet. All you need to create an electromagnet is a battery and a wire. By running the electricity through the wire, you create a magnetic field. Because of this, we're exposed to electromagnetic fields constantly, according to John Webster, a professor emeritus in the University of Wisconsin's biomedical engineering department. "Your wall current goes at 60 hertz, or 60 cycles per second," he says. "We're all bathed in a small of amount of that all the time."

Widmore's experiment makes use of solenoids—loops of wire around a metallic core that will produce a magnetic field when an electric current is passed through it. Solenoids are real devices, but in Lost, they're operating at picoHertz—very low frequencies that don't cause any damage. "Every time somebody gets into an MRI scanner, they're in one of the strongest magnetic fields known to man, about 4 tesla," Webster says. "And that doesn't hurt them." The gauges in the generation station showed the magnetic flux—or the strength of the magnetic field—to be 200 gauss (a term which Webster says went out of vogue after WWII), which equates to .02 Tesla. "That's a pretty weak field," he says.

And what about the poor guy who got fried before Desmond's test? That also reeks of bad science. "You have to have microwaves before you can have heating," Webster says. "Radar, which is an extremely high microwave frequency, has been known to cook eyeballs of sailors who got in front of it in WWII. [Lost is using] very low frequencies, which I don't think can do anything. If they have big coils, what are the coils going to do at low frequencies? There've been a lot of experiments done to people—Otto Schmidt at the University of Minnesota has done them—where he puts people in dark boxes and turns on very strong fields to see if people know when they're on and off. And the people can't perceive these strong fields."

Though electromagnetic fields won't hurt people, they can mess with your electronics. "After WWII, the military set off atomic bombs up in the atmosphere, which created electromagnetic pulses," Webster says. "They found that a lot of electronic equipment all over the place got disabled. So there's no doubt that if you set off an atomic bomb in the atmosphere that it affects electronic equipment, but it doesn't harm people." Unless, of course, you've got a pacemaker. (Guess how you protect your electronics? By putting them in a Faraday cage.)

Even more puzzling is the phrase "Gauss field phasing adjustment for coil form deterioration." Webster is skeptical that it means anything. "I know what phase is, I know what deterioration is," he says. "What are they saying? They have some force that decays with time, and gets smaller and smaller?"

One thing Lost did get right, however, was what happens when metal and an electromagnetic field are in the same room. There have been numerous instances of metal objects ending up inside MRI scanners.

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