A fascinating new hypothesis from Cornell physicist Benjamin Tippett and colleagues:
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. ...
I wonder why they focus exclusively on the evidence of Johansen. After all, what of the crucial notes provided by Thurston's granduncle, George Gammell Angell? Or William Channing Webb's evidence from Greenland? Despite these lapses, obvious to the informed scientist (recall that I do have a M.S. in biophysical inorganic chemistry), I am pleased to see someone engaged at last in serious studies of R'lyeh, where dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
