For those of you who have seen the newest Marvin Candle/Pierre Cheng video from ComiCon, you will notice that he was brought to the Island to study Kerr's equations. So, I decided to get busy Googling. Now, I'n no astrphysicist, but it looks like this could go a long way in explaining a lot of the mysteries about the Island.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric
Read the second paragraph and tell me what you think of its implications to The Island!
"Even stranger phenomena can be observed within the innermost region of this spacetime, such as some forms of time travel. For example, the Kerr metric permits closed, time-like loops in which a band of travellers returns to the same place after moving for a finite time by their own clock; however, they return to the same place and time, as seen by an outside observer.
Then there is something that could explain the necessity of the Swan:
The possibility of extracting spin energy from a rotating black hole was first proposed by the mathematician Roger Penrose in 1969 and is thus called the Penrose process. Rotating black holes in astrophysics are a potential source of large amounts of energy and are used to explain energetic phenomena, such as gamma ray bursts.
Gamma ray bursts, like when the sky turned purple when the Swan imploded? Gamma Rays are at the far (purple) end of the EM spectrum.
How about those of you who are more mathmatically inclinded have a look at this Wiki entry and tell me what you think. There are so many other interesting links in this entry that I'm having a hard time digesting it all!
"Time is not of the essence, it IS the essence!"