Fisher Stevens is Minkowski

To quote:

Fisher Stevens will join the cast of ABC's Lost in a recurring role as the mysterious Minkowski, whose voice was heard on the other side of the satellite phone found by the gang in the third-season finale, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In the Lost fan blogosphere, the name of the character has been tied to German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, whose Minkowski space—a four-dimensional system including the three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time—was used in Einstein's theory of special relativity, the trade paper reported. Lost returns with its fourth season early next year.

Ah, but Minkowski's (the real one) work goes a bit deeper than that, even.  He basically invented the math that Special Relativity is founded on, and indeed General Relativity could be thought to come out of it (and is needed to describe it) as well.  In Minkowski space (or "manifolds"), the concepts of absolute coordinate systems go out the window, and space is allowed to curve, twist, compress, and generally get all wonky.

Interesting enough is a property of Minkowski space which says that in a finite small region surrounding a point (which a couple exceptions), the geometry remains whats known as 'locally flat spacetime,' being indistinguishable from 'classical' spacetime.

Sooo.....  Our little band of islanders are trapped in a region of this locally flat spacetime, yeah!?  while everything around it goes weird.

I like it.

Link: SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel | SCIFI.COM

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