Its all getting too complicated for my ickle brain! I need to watch that episode again... and again and again.

Huh?
Good theory and all but I think it would be a little too much to explain to everyone.  This is primetime TV. You and I might understand what you just wrote (kinda) but does the average viewer?

"John Locke is dead?"

"No, he's in the future and the past at the same time. He's just alive in another year"

"Oh, O.K"

i kindof get what your saying too.  i think i may have a simpler way to say it.  well simpler in my head anyways!  lol
if i can explain it cause i tend to be bad at that....ok lets see....

ok im going to say that for the doctor he was dead on the island 12 hours before he was dead on the freighter.  the way i look at is is, is on the freighter he died at 8:00 PM, say Jan 6th.  fell into the water and started floating towards the island.  when he reached the "barrier" his body was moved 12 hours into the future.  so the island group found him at 8AM, Jan 6th.

i think the problem alot of people have, including me.  is that we think of the times as "time traveled times"  when really its the "same time"  the times just dont match.

haha yeah see i dont know if that helped anyone but me =|

I'm not really sure I want to join in this conversation but I'm going to anyway. First off in regards to the time difference between the doctor falling off of the boat and washing up on shore. Lets say the doctor had a stop watch strapped on him and it was started the exact moment he hit the water and then stopped the exact moment he hit the island shore line. The stop watch has recorded a total of ten minutes. Now It's 9pm on the boat when the doctor falls into the water but its 10:30pm when he washes up on the island. What some of you seem to be inducing from this is that there is an hour and a half time lag between the island and the rest of the world, but what I think it indicates is the island is moving at a different speed through time. In other words the phenomena that may be occurring is that for every one minute of time that passes in the real world, ten minutes has passed on the island. In this example I 10:1 ratio to make the math easy to illustrate.

Next I'm going to further complicate this explanation in attempts to make it more understandable. Each time the island is moved the base line of both timelines might be reset. Lets say The last time the island was moved ten minutes before the doctor fell. When the doctor falls into the water the island is already an hour and a half of his time and now it takes him ten minutes to float ashore but another hour and half has elapsed on the island, so now instead of it being 9:10 when he washes up its more like 12 am or 3 hours later.

I hope I'm explaining this in a coherent fashion. In the movies they use slow motion effects when something dramatic happens as a way to symbolize the phenomena of the sensation of time slowing. Well in real life there have been experiments done to see if that really happens and it does. What happens is our brains actually get stimulated by adrenaline and process information faster giving us the perception that time is slowed. Time obviously has not slowed but because we are conditioned to processing information at a certain speed and we are doing it much faster our internal clocks fall out of sync and we think it's moving slower.

On the island the difference is that it  is actually moving at a different speed. The electromagnetic station they were may of been the time throttle station that were allowing them to make the station move faster or slower and now it may be stuck at one constant time rate. The numbers that were being entered may of been the islands constant like Desmond is for Faraday.

Anyhow sorry if I got too far out there on you guys but I wanted to throw it out there for some of you to bat it around and tear it apart err........ I mean have fun with      LOL

Wow very interesting just_a_fan! I like the idea of the island not being in front or behind by a definitive amount of time but the island time moving at a dfferent pace from everywhere else.

Would that maybe explain why Richard hasn't aged? Maybe at one point the time on the island moved very slowly so he didn't age?

Actually Charlie and JAF both your theories sound correct to me.....

I know one thing, that island is encased in some sort of time bubble...probably caused by the energy beneath the island, making it near impossible to find it without the correct heading....so its possible the island does not exist in "real time" as we perceive it

You have 3 instances we know of, that the island might of appeared in real time....

1. When Desmond got back to the hatch too late to input the numbers causing 815 to crash in the first place....the release of the antimatter/magnetic energy cause the island to shift back into real time...but possibly only for sometime

2. The hatch implosion, which again released that energy...and then the signal of that energy is found by the station out in the ice lands...which might of led to the freightor finding the island...breaking it down, sort of like how Sayid said a satellite has to know where to look....well maybe that was the window for a satellite to get the general location of where the island is?

3. In the last episode when the island is actually "moved"...well this is harder to explain for certain reason, i have my theory that it is moved ahead to 2006, either around the time Ben shows up in the desert or later on.....its why the O6 dont see it there, its been removed from that location/time for who knows how long...which ill stop there cause thats even a harder thory/equation/discussion itself


What im saying is, its quite possible, the island moves into different hours/years, but also may slow "real world" time in itself....i dont think you can visibly see the island in the "real time/world", i have no proof to that, but i dont remember when the freighter was moved closer to the island that you could see the island from the boat....but you could see the boat atleast in a couple frames from the island....sort of like the island has police windows or something lol

Oh god, i must be bored at work, and i think im making this topic worse

When the doctor turns up on the island with his throat slit, Daniel messages the ship that the doctor turned up dead. so in a different situation, what if the doctor hears about how he got found on the island and then hid from the rest of the crew and remained alive? so that they find him dead on the island but he somehow changes the future by not getting killed by keamy? so even though he's already been found dead, technically he's still alive so if he didn't get killed by keamy but he was still found dead, then what would happen? does that make any sense?