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The Valenzetti Equation and Gary Troup
Central to The Lost Experience is the mystery of Valenzetti. The name was first seen on Lost, mentioned briefly on the blast door map.
In The Lost Experience, we learn that Enzo Valenzetti was a brilliant Italian mathematician who was born in the 1920s and raised in Sanremo, Italy. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.N. secretly commissioned a study to predict the apocalypse of humankind, and chose Valenzetti as a disinterested third party to work on it. He returned with a complicated algorithm capable of predicting the exact date of the extinction of the human race. In this equation, The Numbers: 4, 8 , 15, 16, 23, 42, are "core environmental and human factors" that determine the exact time before humanity extinguishes itself.
The Valenzetti Equation, as it became known, was never publicly released, and shrouded in mystery. It is popularly believed that Enzo Valenzetti himself died in a single-engine plane crash during a trans-European flight, shortly after addressing the U.N. However, there are also rumors he is still alive and in hiding.
Either way, the details of his equation remain largely unknown. Gary Troup wrote a non-fiction book about this subject, called The Valenzetti Equation. However, the few copies that were published were all bought up by Alvar Hanso, a fact that frustrated Gary Troup, who wanted to get the truth out. After the success of his fictional mystery, Bad Twin, Troup was flying back from a publicity tour in Australia, on Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 with his fiancee (flight attendant Cindy Chandler), when the plane crashed and was lost. Gary Troup is presumed dead. The book, Bad Twin, may contain references to The Lost Experience that Troup wanted to hint at, since it suggests that Widmore Corporation is tied to The Hanso Foundation, and briefly mentions Thomas Werner Mittelwerk (villain from The Lost Experience) as an amoral character.
We later learn in the Sri Lanka video that Mittelwerk and the DHARMA Initiative were trying to change one of the "core values" (The Numbers) of the Valenzetti Equation, by releasing a deadly virus on remote villages, and then testing a vaccine to try and obtain an "optimal mortality rate of 30%". They obtained this figure by using autistic savants (imprisoned in the Vik Institute, the mental health hospital of The Hanso Foundation) to run calculations through the Valenzetti Equation over and over. The hieroglyphics (seen on Lost in the countdown clock) are 'representative symbols' for The Numbers, and were chosen because they mean "Underworld".
There are suggestions in the story that the virus and/or vaccine affects certain genetic targets differently (from the Sri Lanka video), and that it may have been released on an island (from a secret document seeking an appropriate island location called Spider Protocol).
Item Last Updated: September 27, 2006, 10:11:21 AM by Pandora
