In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

**AetheLove** · 10-31-12, 01:02 PM

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming - of relativity and the localized effects of a space-time bubble.

So this happened:

Originally Posted by Alundil

Really wish I had thought of this first....

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.-cthlhu-jpg

And there was some confusion:

Originally Posted by SovietDooM

I don't get it. I know its childhood but how is it funny.

And then some asshole tried to be more clever than helpful:

Originally Posted by AetheLove

Because: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Sorry about that, SD. Please allow me to come clean.

The license plate - CTHLHU - references Cthulhu, a character from H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu", who is effectively a God - one of the Old Ones or Great Ones. It's a great story, and you can read it online in a number of places:

The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

There is also some Lovecraft available at Project Gutenberg.

Lovecraft is one of those authors whose influence is far greater than his fame. He was a master of horror and fantasy in the early 20th century. He, along with Poe before him, basically reinvented fantasy, horror, and the macabre. Many (most?) of our present-day stories about the occult, powerful beings, minds twisted to insanity, and science gone horribly wrong, come through Lovecraft.

Heard of the Necronomicon? Lovecraft invented it. How about a place called "Arkham", or the Asylum there? Lovecraft. Same for Miskatonic University.

The gibberish I quoted in that post operates as the standard call-sign for all things Cthulhu:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

Which translates to: In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Am I writing all this out because I can no longer stand to bear the weight of mounting guilt over my crass an unhelpful post?

Nah.

I'm doing it because yesterday I saw this:

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn | The Titanium Physicists Podcast

Where-in is linked a paper published here:

[1210.8144] Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific

I quote from the intro:

In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents.

We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause.

We propose a simplified example of such a geometry, and show using numerical computation that Johansen’s descriptions were, for the most part, not simply the ravings of a lunatic. Rather, they are the nontechnical observations of an intelligent man who did not understand how to describe what he was seeing. Conversely, it seems to us improbable that Johansen should have unwittingly given such a precise description of the consequences of spacetime curvature, if the details of this story were merely the dregs of some half remembered fever dream.

We calculate the type of matter which would be required to generate such exotic spacetime curvature. Unfortunately, we determine that the required matter is quite unphysical, and possess a nature which is entirely alien to all of the experiences of human science. Indeed, any civilization with mastery over such matter would be able to construct warp drives, cloaking devices, and other exotic geometries required to conveniently travel through the cosmos.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come ...

AetheLove