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trying to answer this question about portals as a fictional motif is taking me on a whole dive which i might as well document here before i lose track of it:
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have stories about opening interdimensional portals been a thing in human history for longer than say, 100 years? is it just me or are we subconsciously memeing this into existence... (i just watched Stranger Things 3 fyi)
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the wikipedia article about dreams in the witch house says lovecraft was inspired by a lecture given by de sitter called "the size of the universe," and a book by eddington called "the nature of the physical world". i can't make heads or tails of the septimius felton thing
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(interesting science history thing here: in 1932 the word "galaxy" was apparently not yet used to refer to galaxies other than the milky way! its etymology just refers to the milky way. de sitter describes here how to infer that the milky way is a "spiral nebula")
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tbh i don't have a clear sense of what exactly lovecraft was getting out of de sitter's work here. maybe a general sense that mathematics is capable of telling you surprising and nontrivial facts about the structure of the universe 🧐
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yeah, maybe the idea of hyperbolic space (closely related to anti-de sitter space)? which has potentially horrifying properties, like that: (exponentially) vast volumes can lurk within normal-sized perimeters; and you can be in close proximity to too many things at once
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