I don't know if it's a clue or just more fun with character names, but when Frank gives Daniel the phone so he can call the ship prior to his experiment he (Frank) says, "If Minkowski gets on the line hang up immediately." Twenty years ago I knew Maxwell's equations (including which one he got from Faraday) and what the Lorentz transformation was and who Minkowski was, but I certainly didn't pay enough attention in class to remember it a couple decades later. I know we have some Buffista physicists, but I don't know if any of them watch Lost. If so maybe s/he can explain his contributions & their connection to the show. In the link above scroll down to the part about "The Einstein-Minkowski Spacetime":
The characteristic feature of Galileo's Spacetime was the set of horizontal slices representing "planes of simultaneity". On a given plane, all of its events are simultaneous. This is the notion of Absolute Time, in which all observers agree on the elapsed-time between two given events.[...]
Einstein's extension of the Principle of Relativity to all physical laws requires us to abandon Galileo's Spacetime---in particular, its universal "planes of simultaneity"---that is, the notion of Absolute Time.
In its place, we have the Einstein-Minkowski Spacetime... The characteristic feature of this spacetime is the Light Cone, a double-cone centered at each event in Spacetime.
I would excerpt a coherent explanation of that but I don't really understand it. And even when I sober up I don't think I'll understand it.