Lost producers Lindelof and Cuse were at the Comic-Con last weekend and they showed a “teaser” trailer for season 4 of Lost (which they said had been sent to them from Scandinavia) as well as giving out some other bits of info. Since I haven’t seen any mention of it here yet, I thought I’d throw it out for the spoilerholics on the board to speculate on.
For the non-spoilerholics, this is a spoiler-free initial post. Spoilers in first reply.
OK, first up is the teaser trailer, which is apparently of outtakes from the orientation video for DHARMA Station 6 - “The Orchid”. The video stars everyone’s favorite DHARMA spokesperson; Marvin Candle/Edmund Wickman (and going by “Edward Haliwax” here)
I hate to say it, but it looks like the are going the time travel route after all. And, can one of our physicists around here tell me what the “Cashmir Effect” means?
In other info:
Michael will be back as a regular.
There will be both flashbacks and flash-forwards from now on.
They say the questions the fans should be asking are “Who was in the coffin?” and “Who is really on the freighter?”
They also made the somewhat cryptic statement “The show has never really been about getting off the Island. There’s this whole chapter of the story that takes place off the Island.”
There’s more, but those are the highlights. So, let the speculation begin!
Was there a “Jesus loves Jacob” frame put in there about half-way thru? I might have read it incorrectly, but it was something like that.
With all respect, my brain dribbled out my ears after the first paragraph. Could you provide the utter moron translation for me? 
From google definitions:
The attractive pressure between two flat, parallel metal plates placed very near to each other in a vacuum. The pressure is due to a reduction in the usual number of virtual particles in the space between the plates.
agh. I can’t watch this. Five more months, and what, 8 or 9 between each season? It’s too much of a tease.
It looked like it said “God loves You like He loved Jacob” to me, like the trippy film they were showing Carl.
Now that there’s time travel involved (which i thought was pretty evident from the Desmond-centric show in season 3) here’s who I think was in the coffin (spoilered for dramatic tension!)
Jack! Dum dum dum! He’s the proverbial Rabbit #15.
So why can’t the bunnies touch each other? Will they asplode? Or will something more deadly happen (that is, to the people around them)?
cmyk:
I dunno dude…don’t you think that guy that welcomed Jack to the funeral parlor would have, like…reacted differently to seeing Jack?
And, is Time Travel the same as Parallel Universes (I am a real sorry excuse for a geek, I am)? I just watched the parallel universes episode of Futurama so I know that two bunnies with the same number on their backs can exist in the same parallel universes and they can meet if they go through a box that contains the parallel universe.
This alone insures that I won’t watch a single episode next season.
Reply to the above speculation:
You have a point… He was the funeral director or something like that, not necessarily the the guy who embalms the body. So maybe he didn’t even see who was in there? And even if he did see, perhaps the dead version of jack didn’t have a beard 
Could be Parallel Universes too. Either way, it’s a similar approach to the time travel theory. I just hope they go somewhere fresh and twisted with it.
Ditto. I consider myself a fairly well-read person, maybe not SDMB elite, but that first paragraph might as well have been random numbers as far as comprehension is concerned. MY BRAIN ASPLODE
Terry O’Quinn is in some new series called Masters of Science Fiction this fall…so what’s up with Locke?
Woah…the “future” Jack had a beard? (I forget) If that’s true then you are really on to something. We all know that beard = evil/parallel/bizarro version of a character!
If Batmanuel can be on the island for thirty years and not age a day, and if Desmond can have flashes of the future, and if the smoke monster can exist at all, then Time has to be part of the answer.
I’ll third that. My first thought actually was to check wikipedia, but to me that article is only slightly more comprehensible than line noise.
About all I can get out of it is that the Casmir Effect is an attractive force between two objects that isn’t related to the other basic forces and that it is somehow tied into vacuum energy. Is that about all I can get at the “Quantum Mechanics for Dummies” level or is there something else to it?
Also, Candle/Wickman/Haliwax says something about the Casmir effect being stronger than normal on the Island. What kind of effect would that have?
vivalostwages - The spoilage I’ve seen (I’m not bothering to spoiler-box since I clearly put “spoilers” in the thread title and OP) says that Locke is going to be separated from most of the Losties group for most of the season. He is going to be at “the temple” for a while with the remaining Others then he is going to go off on his own for a while.
And Masters of Science Fiction is just a four-episode anthology show, so he won’t be in more than the one episode there. Of more concern is the guy who plays Richard Alpert; he’s a regular on the new CBS (I think) series Cane and so may not be available for Lost.
silenus - Yeah, I know what you mean. TPTB made some comments about how the Island provides a chance for redemption and by returning Michael will get that chance. I think it’s going to be pretty hard to do that, but we’ll see.
Possibly related to that is an implication that has also been made by TPTB that says that Libby was involved with DHARMA and/or the people on the freighter, who they have said are going to be far worse than the Others ever were. So maybe they’re going to try to convince us that he did the right thing by shooting her. I dunno; we’ll see.
I immediately assumed it was the Star Trek idea that matter and antimatter must never meet or else they will cause total annihilation.
No, Jacob is here, Lazuras was there.