I find it interesting that the guy on the boat's name is Minkowski. That is the name of a mathematician who thought up a description of space based on Einstein's theory of relativity with the central idea being something called a light cone. If you are in a frame of reference that is moving very close to the speed of light (in comparison to another frame of reference) the "light cone" describes how the same light can move differently through different frames so long as you consider the time of one spatial frame as sitting differently over another spatial frame. It also helps better visualize the relative nature of simultaneity in the universe. That's why I was curious about the clocks used in Daniel's rocket, "payload" test. I didn't look to closely at the clocks and had to look them up on the internet later.

Essentially, the gal on the boat was getting a reading which told her that the rocket landed at its destination before her conversation with Daniel had even ended. He didn't see the rocket land until a long time afterwards, however, and its clock was faster than his by about a half hour. I'm not sure what this means for the show precisely, special relativity is a complicated subject and the show hasn't revealed much about how the island works yet, but it's obvious that time dilation is being strongly hinted at here. (The fact that people have to travel on and off the Island at a precise angle might also be a the result of some relativistic distortion.) How extreme time dilation and other effects could apply to an island that can be reached by air and sea from our earth seems rather silly to me, but perhaps the writers are smarter than I give them credit. I'm guessing it will be the typical, sci-fi-fudged version of physics. Perhaps in the end we'll find out that the Island intersects some sort of extremely weird gravitational phenomenon.