The Collider is to Blame: Why We Remember What Didn’t Happen, and if Time Has Slowed Down

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Fans of magnetic storms and retrograde Mercury can step aside with their anachronisms. A new reason has emerged in the world to explain all troubles: a high-tech, little-understood, and therefore very mysterious cause called the Large Hadron Collider. It was shut down on June 30 for scheduled maintenance – and the internet simply exploded with an abundance of conspiracy theories about it. In brief – about how we live in another dimension of reality and what will happen if the LHC is turned on again.

Physics and a Pinch of Esotericism

Over the past 15 years, probably more conspiracy theories have arisen around the Large Hadron Collider than around any other scientific project in the world. If in 2008 people feared that the accelerator would create a black hole and destroy the Earth, then after the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, conspiracy theories shifted towards much more exotic ideas. For example, changes in timelines, the collective Mandela effect (false memories about something), humanity’s transition to another reality, the matrix of opening portals to other dimensions, and even interference with the course of time. Scientific confirmation for all this is zero point zero, but the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is forced to constantly publish official clarifications and refutations.

Everything revolves around the fact that practically all inhabitants of the Earth, except for specialists in physics, chemistry, and other natural sciences, have, to put it mildly, no idea why the LHC was built and what is happening in it. Misunderstanding has spawned a host of rumors, and Hollywood films like “Angels & Demons,” which mention dark matter, quarks, the Higgs boson, and the “God particle,” have added a pinch of esotericism to this volatile mixture – and off it went!

LHC, Mayans, and the End of the World on Top

Forgive us, physicists, but we will try to explain on our fingers what the LHC is. Roughly speaking, it is a closed track underground, somewhere between France and Switzerland, where instead of cars, particles – protons – fly towards each other. Special magnets accelerate them to the speed of light, the proton “cars” collide, and scientists look at the results. Once the Higgs boson came out (more on that later), but in general, this experiment is needed to understand what the Universe is made of and how it appeared. The collision of protons is like the Big Bang, then the appearance of the Universe and some laws of nature.

Citizens who see something else in this experiment have their own point of view on what is happening. Protons and bosons do not particularly interest them, there is something more large-scale!

Let’s go back to 2012 and remember the Mayans with their prediction that on December 21, 2012, our civilization would end. By the way, on this beautiful date, many people got married – probably to be together until the end, but not to delay for too long.

So, no one knew, but social media knows, that on that very day, scientists turned on the LHC at full power, broke the fabric of space-time, the world snapped shut, and we were transported to an alternative dimension of reality… These statements can be easily found on social media, they are seriously discussed and even confirmed.

“Have you noticed how we’ve been shaken since 2012? What, it all started much earlier, in 2008, when the LHC was just launched! The physical world was then destroyed by a micro-black hole, and we were imperceptibly reprogrammed. And in 2012, when the Higgs boson, the “God particle,” was discovered, the point of final quantum transition came. The old Earth was destroyed, humanity’s consciousness moved to the “Earth-B” server. Remember how many quantum anomalies and memory bugs there were, the Mandela effect alone is worth something!”

Gloomy commentators who add their two cents stand apart. “In 2008, the world crisis hit us – not for nothing. In 2012, the Higgs boson appeared and an anomalous leap in technologies – also not for nothing. When were the next dates of anomalous surges? 2015, 2019, and 2022? Well, it’s all clear!

The LHC made many recall the predictions of the Mayan Indians. Photo: ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP via Getty Images

What is the Mandela Effect

In 2012, internet researchers suddenly discovered that the collective memory of millions of people did not match reality. It all started with “Star Wars”: in the film, the robot C-3PO had a silver right shin and foot. However, thousands of people insisted that the leg was gold. From there came the phrase “Luke, I am your father,” which Darth Vader did not say at all (in the original – “No, I am your father”). In the domestic space, they figured out whether the song by Lyudmila Gurchenko “Five Minutes” contained the words “is it a lot or a little” (they are not there, but for some reason in the minds of millions of people they sound), and also argued whether the Mona Lisa from Da Vinci’s painting smiles or is serious.

However, it was also then that it turned out that the first president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who was believed to be already dead in the 80s, was alive and well; he died only in 2013. But thousands of people swore that they remembered news reports about Mandela’s death. As a result, this wondrous effect of mass false memory was given Mandela’s name – and off it went again.

“It feels like someone carelessly edited the source code of our reality,” explained conspiracy theorists, and this explanation suited many.

The wondrous effect of mass false memory was given the name of Nelson Mandela. Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Our Analog World Has Died

Further, thanks to the same, of course, the hadron collider, time sped up, and with it, the number of alternative reality variants increased. After 2012, according to theorists, a colossal evolutionary leap occurred, which we did not have time to digest. Smartphones turned from toys into an extension of our bodies. Social networks switched to algorithmic feeds, which began to harshly format our attention and consciousness. Real human communication was completely absorbed by a digital surrogate. Our warm analog world, where we lived from the early 2000s, has irrevocably perished. In its place came a neon high-speed matrix, where human attention is the main resource for pumping energy. We did not die physically, but we made a hard quantum leap into a controlled digital reality.

Admittedly, this theory “perfectly explains” why we suddenly became addicted to gadgets. They control us! When, while scrolling through social media, we suddenly find that morning has already arrived – it means that time has accelerated its course (and not that we mindlessly plunged into the digital reality of the smartphone, losing our sense of time). Strange bouts of nostalgia for the good old days, even among the young, are also our lament for “that” reality. Although let’s be honest with ourselves: in difficult times, we always tend to think back to the years when life was easy, warm, and bright. Everything is explained simply, but for this, there are conspiracy theories, to explain everything simply.

The LHC is being shut down for maintenance again, are we expecting new unprecedented events? Photo: wikipedia.org

A Portal to Hell Was Opened!

However, after the acceleration of time and mass false memory, the statement that “the LHC has broken through a portal” is in the lead. In various versions, this portal leads to hell/a parallel universe/the fifth dimension/the spirit world. For some reason, such messages have particularly flooded TikTok, Facebook, and X social networks after another launch of the collider, first in 2016, and then – from July 5, 2022.

A portal to hell was indeed opened, only conspiracy theorists opened it. Yes, they examined the CERN emblem and cried out in horror: the logo depicts the trajectories of particle movement along the collider track, but fans of conspiracy theories found three sixes there, the so-called biblical “number of the beast.”

Before they could catch their breath, another group of theorists stirred up trouble over the statue of the Indian god Shiva in the image of Nataraja (“king of dance” in Sanskrit) installed in the CERN courtyard. In this image, the Hindu deity symbolizes the continuation of the cycle of destruction and rebirth of the world, and the cessation of the dance will mark the end of world creation.

It is clear that after this, the Large Hadron Collider was declared apocalyptically terrible. In fact, Shiva appeared at CERN because India joined the organization in the 60s. The Indians gave the Europeans a gift, explaining that the movement of particles in the LHC is similar to the cosmic dance performed by Shiva precisely in the image of Nataraja.

This explanation, of course, drowned in the curses of anti-collider advocates. And after a few CERN employees in 2016 depicted a humorous ritual near the statue, “witnesses of reptilians” and “the golden billion,” who were trailing behind in the conspiracy rankings, desperately wailed.

In 2024, by the way, a video of a strange theatrical performance, which was passed off as a “ritual of opening a portal,” has gone viral again. In fact, the video was shot at the opening ceremony of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland in 2016 and had nothing to do with CERN or the Large Hadron Collider.

This year, the LHC was decided to be shut down for another scheduled maintenance, although, according to rumors, forever. But this does not reassure conspiracy theorists. Now they are talking about changes in the speed of time, then, when the LHC is finally stopped, they will come up with something else enticing that strongly reminds us of old jokes about 5G towers. Terms like “space-time,” “dark matter,” and “other dimensions” sound too tasty not to be used to concoct several dozen versions. And social networks – the offspring of the LHC! – will instantly spread it to all corners of the world, where these theories will find their followers who are not well-versed in physics but are well-versed in conspiracy theories.

But let’s not tell them that there are five more hadron colliders operating in the world…

Джерело: kp.ua