Give me a break...

A while back I wrote a piece about the Mandela Effect, which is the idea that when you remember some major event differently than other people, it's not because your memory is wrong, it's because you have side-slipped here from an alternate universe where the version you remember actually happened.  The phenomenon gets its name from the fact that a lot of people "remember" that Nelson Mandela died in jail in the mid-1970s, which of course didn't happen.  These same folks are the ones who make an enormous deal over "remembering" that the Berenstain Bears -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as "Your parents and teachers are always right about everything" and "Kids should follow the rules or else they are bad" -- were originally the Berenstein Bears.

Why their name would be spelled different in an alternate universe, I don't know.  From watching Star Trek and Lost in Space, I always assumed that the major differences you'd find in an alternate universe is that all of the good guys would be bad guys, and because of that, many of them would be wearing beards.

But the Mandela Effect isn't going away, despite the fact that if you believe it you're basically saying that your memory is 100% accurate, all of the time, and that you have never misremembered anything in your life.  The whole thing has become immensely popular to "study" -- although what there is there to study, I don't know.  Witness the fact that there is now a subreddit (/r/MandelaEffect) with tens of thousands of subscribers.

The most recent thing to be brought to light by this cadre of timeline-jumpers has to do with the "Kit Kat" candy bar.  Apparently many people recall the name from their childhood as being "Kit Kats" (with an "s"), even though that doesn't really work with the candy's irritating ear-worm of a jingle, "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar."  So once again, it's more likely that you're in an alternate universe than you just aren't recalling the name of a candy bar correctly.  

But now, at long last, we have someone who has proposed an explanation as to why all of this is happening.

You ready?

The Mandela Effect is caused by...

... CERN.

Yes, CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, home of the Large Hadron Collider, which became famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up recently.  CERN has been the target of woo-woo silliness before now; back in 2009, projects had to be sidelined for months while the mechanism was repaired after a seagull dropped a piece of a baguette onto some electrical wires and caused a short, and the woo-woos decided that the seagull had been sent back in time to take out the LHC before it destroyed the entire universe.

So I guess there's no end to what CERN can do, up to and including vaporizing specific letters off of candy bar wrappers.  But you know, if CERN can alter our timeline, don't you think there's more important stuff that it could accomplish besides changing the spellings of candy bars and cartoon bears?  First thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Donald Trump's father a condom.

But I might be a little biased in that regard.

What baffles me about all of this is that not only is there abundant evidence that human memory is plastic and fallible, but just from our own experience you'd think there would be hundreds of examples where we'd clearly recalled things incorrectly.  The fact that these people have to invent an "effect" that involves alternate universes to support why they're always right takes hubris to the level of an art form.

So anyway.  I'm not too worried about the possibility of my having side-slipped from another timeline where I am a world-famous author whose novels regularly rocket to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.  I'm more concerned at the moment over how the hell I'm going to get the "Kit Kat" jingle out of my head, because that thing is really fucking annoying.

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False vacuum catastrophe

It's odd how enamored people are of things that could destroy the entire universe.

I mean, on one level I get it.  The sheer power of the natural world is pretty awe-inspiring, and as I've mentioned before, if I hadn't become a mild-mannered novelist, I definitely would have been a a tornado chaser.  That same love of extreme danger (especially when it's not you experiencing it) explains shows like The Deadliest Catch and the innumerable quasi-documentaries wherein divers swim around in chum-filled waters and still act surprised when they're attacked by sharks.

But on a larger scale, there's a real curiosity about things that could wipe out pretty much everything.  A while back, I wrote a piece about people sounding gleeful that we might be looking down the gun barrel of a gamma-ray burster (we're not), and over and over we've heard alarmists suggesting that CERN was going to create a black hole that would eat the Earth (it's not).  But that doesn't begin to exhaust the ways in which we all could die in horrible agony.

Which brings us to the concept of the false vacuum.

Sounds harmless enough, doesn't it?  Well, this is in the long tradition of physicists giving seriously weird things cutesy names, like "strange quarks" and "glueballs."

The idea of the false vacuum is that the universe is currently in a "metastable state."  What this means is that right now we're in a locally stable configuration, but if something destabilizes us a little bit, we might find ourselves suddenly plunging into a more stable state -- a "true vacuum."  The situation, then, would be similar to that of the little ball in the graph below:

As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, the ball is stable; but if something gives it a push up the hill in the middle, it'll crest the hill and find itself rushing downward into a more stable position -- the "true vacuum."

Why this concerns anyone but the physicists is that the result of our reconfiguring into a true vacuum would be that a bubble would form, rushing outward at the speed of light, and destroying everything in its path.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics suggests that from the mass of the Higgs boson and the top quark, an estimate could be made of just how likely this is.  Writer Robert Walker concludes, from the research of Joseph Lykken and others, that the answer is "not very:"

[I]f it could happen, then you’d expect it to have happened already in the first 1/10,000,000,000th of a second along with the other symmetry breaking when gravity split off from the other forces, when it was tremendously hot...

 
Since that hasn’t happened, the false vacuum has to be very stable, or else, probably as we find new physics we find out that it is not in a false vacuum state at all.

 
And yes, on the basis of the measured mass of the Higgs boson, the false vacuum has to be very stable.  Joseph Lykken says that an event that triggers a patch of true vacuum, if the theory is correct, happens on average once every ten thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years.

 
That means it is nothing to be worried about.

Walker, who is a mathematician, says that the likelihood of a true vacuum bubble occurring in any given century is less than the likelihood of purchasing tickets for twelve consecutive Euromillions lotteries, and winning the jackpot for all of them.

So "don't worry about it" seems to be an understatement.

However, that hasn't stopped the alarmists from freaking out about it, probably largely due to the fact that if it did happen, it would be pretty catastrophic.  Also, because a lot of them seem to feel that the physicists (for this, read "mad scientists") are actively trying to trigger the creation of a true vacuum, which would be an idiotic thing to do even if it were possible because they'd be the first ones to get vaporized, and wouldn't even have the pleasure of standing around rubbing their hands together and cackling maniacally for more than about a nanosecond.

But then there are the ones who think that it could happen accidentally (again, because of CERN, of course), and the physicists are simply being reckless, not suicidal.  I tend to agree with Walker, though.  I'm way more worried about the idiotic things humans are currently doing to the environment, and our determination to slaughter each other over things like who has the best Invisible Friend, than I am about triggering the Scary Bubble of Death.

Anyhow.  That's our Terrifying Thing That Can Kill you for today, along with some soothing words about why it's not very likely.  Now ya'll'll have to excuse me, because I'm gonna go have a pint of beer and watch Twister for the seventeenth time.

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It's the end of the world, if you notice

I have commented more than once about my incredulity with regards to end-of-the-world predictions.  Despite the fact that to date, they have had a 100% failure rate, people of various stripes (usually of either the ultra-religious persuasion or the woo-woo conspiracy one) continue to say that not only is the world doomed, they know exactly when, how, and why.  (If you don't believe me, take a look at the Wikipedia page for apocalyptic predictions, which have occurred so often they had to break it down by century.)  

As far as why this occurs -- why repeated failure doesn't make the true believers say, "Well, I guess that claim was a bunch of bullshit, then" -- there are a variety of reasons.  One is a sort of specialized version of the backfire effect, which occurs when evidence against a claim you believe strongly leaves you believing it even more strongly.  Way back in 1954 psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter infiltrated a doomsday cult, and in fact Festinger was with the cult on the day they'd claimed the world was going to end.  When 11:30 PM rolled around and nothing much was happening, the leader of the cult went into seclusion.  A little after midnight she returned with the joyous news that the cult's devotion and prayers had averted the disaster, and god had decided to spare the world, solely because of their fidelity.

Hallelujah!  We better keep praying, then!

(Note bene: The whole incident, and the analysis of the phenomenon by Festinger et al., is the subject of the fascinating book When Prophecy Fails.)

Despite this, the repeated failure of an apocalyptic prophecy can cause your followers to lose faith eventually, as evangelical preacher Harold Camping found out.  So the people who believe this stuff often have to engage in some fancy footwork after the appointed day and hour arrive, and nothing happens other than the usual nonsense.

Take, for example, the much-publicized "Mayan apocalypse" on December 21, 2012 that allegedly was predicted by ancient Mayan texts (it wasn't) and was going to herald worldwide natural disasters (it didn't).  The True Believers mostly retreated in disarray when December 22 dawned, as well they should have.  My wife and I threw a "Welcoming In The Apocalypse" costume party on the evening of December 21 (I went as a zombie, which I felt was fitting given the theme), and I have to admit to some disappointment when the hour of midnight struck and we were all still there.  But it turns out that not all of the Mayan apocalyptoids disappeared after the prediction failed; one of them, one Nick Hinton, says actually the end of the world did happen, as advertised...

... but no one noticed.

Hinton's argument, such as it is, starts with a bit of puzzling over why you never hear people talking about the 2012 apocalypse any more.  (Apparently "it didn't happen" isn't a sufficient reason.)  Hinton finds this highly peculiar, and points out that this was the year CERN fired up the Large Hadron Collider and discovered the Higgs boson, and that this can't possibly be a coincidence.  He wonders if this event destroyed the universe and/or created a black hole, and then "sucked us in" without our being aware of it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lucas Taylor / CERN, CMS Higgs-event, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Me, I think I'd notice if I got sucked into a black hole.  They're kind of violent places, as I described a recent post about Sagittarius A* and the unpleasant process called "spaghettification."   But Hinton isn't nearly done with his explanation.  He writes:

There's the old cliché argument that "nothing has felt right" since 2012.  I agree with this...  [E]ver since then the world seems to descend more and more into chaos each day.  Time even feels faster.  There's some sort of calamity happening almost daily.  Mass shootings only stay in the headlines for like 12 hours now.  Did we all die and go to Hell?...  Like I've said, I think we live in a series of simulations.  Perhaps the universe was destroyed by CERN and our collective consciousness was moved into a parallel universe next door.  It would be *almost* identical.

Of course, this is a brilliant opportunity to bring out the Mandela effect, about which I've written before.  The idea of the Mandela effect is that people remember various stuff differently (such as whether Nelson Mandela died in prison, whether it's "Looney Tunes" or "Loony Tunes" and "The Berenstein Bears" or "The Berenstain Bears," and so forth), and the reason for this is not that people's memories in general suck, but that there are alternate universes where these different versions occur and people slip back and forth between them.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

What I find intriguing about Hinton's explanation is not all the stuff about CERN, though, but his arguing that the prediction didn't fail because he was wrong, but that the world ended and seven-billion-plus people didn't even notice.  Having written here at Skeptophilia for over twelve years, I'm under no illusions about the general intelligence level of humanity, but for fuck's sake, we're not that unobservant.  And even if somehow CERN did create an alternate universe, why would it affect almost nothing except for things like the spelling of Saturday morning cartoon titles?

So this is taking the backfire effect and raising it to the level of performance art.  This is saying that it is more likely that the entire population of the Earth was unaware of a universe-ending catastrophe than it is that you're simply wrong.

Which is so hubristic that it's kind of impressive.

But I better wind this up, because I've got to prepare myself for the next end of the world, which (according to Messiah Foundation International, which I have to admit sounds pretty impressive) is going to occur in January of 2026.  This only gives us all a bit shy of three years to get ready, so I really should get cracking on my next novel.  And if that apocalypse doesn't pan out, evangelical Christian lunatic Kent Hovind says not to worry, the Rapture is happening in 2028, we're sure this time, cross our hearts and hope to be assumed bodily into heaven.

So many apocalypses, so little time.

****************************************

Figure and ground

One of the most fundamental unanswered questions in physics is why there is something instead of nothing.

I don't mean this in an existential sense, although now that I come to think of it, it's about the most existential question there is.  But this isn't asking if there is some sort of final cause for the universe, be it a Creator or whatever other spin you could put on it.  No, this is a purely scientific question, and one which has defied all attempts to answer it.

The basic problem stems from the issue of antimatter.  You probably know that for every particle, there is a corresponding antiparticle that has the same mass-energy but opposite properties -- protons and antiprotons, electrons and positrons (anti-electrons), neutrons and antineutrons, and so forth.  Brought into contact, matter and antimatter undergo mutual annihilation, and all of that mass is converted to gamma rays with an energy release as determined by Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2.

So far, nothing particularly surprising, especially if you've watched any of the various iterations of Star Trek, with their starships powered by an "antimatter core" brought into contact with matter in a controlled way and using the energy released to propel the ship.  (And, just about every other week, having a "warp core breach" leading to an uncontrolled matter-antimatter explosion, a catastrophe averted each time only minutes before the credits roll.)

Here's the rub, though.  All of the current models of the Big Bang suggest that at the beginning of the universe, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts, like the energy equivalent of figure and ground.  They then should have collided, releasing the energy as photons, ultimately resulting in a universe that has zero matter of either kind except for the transient "virtual" particle pairs that are created from photons and more or less instantaneously come back together again, mutually annihilating and producing more photons.

Why, then, is there an imbalance?  Why do we see all this left-over matter -- the planets and stars around us -- instead of a universe filled with nothing but photons?  (Yes, I know, if that were the case we wouldn't be there to "see" it.  Just play along, okay?)

Some have suggested that distant galaxies might be antimatter; after all, at a distance you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.  But the problem with that is if this were true, there would be an interface somewhere between the supposed antimatter galaxy and the nearest matter galaxy, and at that interface there would be constant collisions of matter and antimatter -- so you'd see a sort of curtain of gamma-ray production representing the boundary.  We see no such thing anywhere we look.  From the observational data we have, it appears that all of the visible objects in the universe are made of ordinary matter.

Nota bene: Observational data also do not support that a planet made of antimatter would have identical people with opposite personalities, such as Evil Spock With A Beard.

So physicists surmised that if the processes during the Big Bang did produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, perhaps the asymmetry came from the particles themselves -- i.e., the antimatter particles don't have exactly identical-but-opposite properties from their matter equivalents, but some small difference that made the matter particles either more numerous or more likely to survive.

Well, a paper last week in Nature appears to have ruled that out as well.

Researchers at CERN working on the Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) looked at the oscillations of a single antiproton trapped in a magnetic field, and compared those oscillations with the equivalent from an ordinary proton.  After taking data from over 24,000 of these pairs, they found that the measured properties of the two are absolutely identical -- to an accuracy of 1.6 billionths of a percent.

That pretty much settles it, I'd think.

However, this means the original question still stands.  What caused the imbalance?  Is there still a possibility that some of the most distant galaxies -- possibly ones on opposite side of the 330-million-light-year-wide Boötes Void -- might be made of antimatter?  It's possible, but we've seen nothing to support that as an explanation.  Or that there's a "multiverse" with equal numbers of matter and antimatter galaxies all "separated causally" (i.e., so far apart they can't even potentially interact), so the entire thing is balanced, but only on the biggest scales?  The problem with that is if they are causally separated, then they've never been in contact in such a way as to be able to interact or influence each other, so it's hard to imagine how they'd have been created by a single event at one space-time location.  Also, in such a model, it's not even theoretically possible to obtain any information about these supposed antimatter regions, because they're beyond the distance limit from which we could observe them.  This puts the issue outside of what is even potentially verifiable by observational data, so as a hypothesis -- to use Wolfgang Pauli's acerbic quote -- "it's not even wrong."

Which leaves one of the biggest puzzles in physics still unanswered.

But it's this kind of conundrum that drives science, and had pushed us toward understanding some of the deepest mysteries of the universe.  It might be frustrating, but that's the way research works.  As Richard Feynman put it, "I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

***********************************

Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

It's the end of the world, if you notice

I have commented more than once about my incredulity with regards to end-of-the-world predictions.  Despite the fact that to date, they have had a 100% failure rate, people of various stripes (usually of either the ultra-religious persuasion or the woo-woo conspiracy one) continue to say that not only is the world doomed, they know exactly when, how, and why.  (If you don't believe me, take a look at the Wikipedia page for apocalyptic predictions, which have occurred so often they had to break it down by century.)

As far as why this occurs -- why repeated failure doesn't make the true believers say, "Well, I guess that claim was a bunch of bullshit, then" -- there are a variety of reasons.  One is a sort of specialized version of the backfire effect, which occurs when evidence against a claim you believe strongly leaves you believing it even more strongly.  Way back in 1954 psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter infiltrated a doomsday cult, and in fact Festinger was with the cult on the day they'd claimed the world was going to end.  When 11:30 PM rolled around and nothing much was happening, the leader of the cult went into seclusion.  A little after midnight she returned with the joyous news that the cult's devotion and prayers had averted the disaster, and god had decided to spare the world, solely because of their fidelity.

Hallelujah!  We better keep praying, then!

(Note bene: The whole incident, and the analysis of the phenomenon by Festinger et al., is the subject of the fascinating book When Prophecy Fails.)

Despite this, the repeated failure of an apocalyptic prophecy can cause your followers to lose faith eventually, as evangelical preacher Harold Camping found out.  So the people who believe this stuff often have to engage in some fancy footwork after the appointed day and hour arrive, and nothing happens other than the usual nonsense.

Take, for example, the much-publicized "Mayan apocalypse" on December 21, 2012 that allegedly was predicted by ancient Mayan texts (it wasn't) and was going to herald worldwide natural disasters (it didn't).  The True Believers mostly retreated in disarray when December 22 dawned, as well they should have.  My wife and I threw a "Welcoming In The Apocalypse" costume party on the evening of December 21, and I have to admit to some disappointment when the hour of midnight struck and we were all still there.  But it turns out that not all of the Mayan apocalyptoids disappeared after the prediction failed; one of them, one Nick Hinton, says actually the end of the world did happen, as advertised...

... but no one noticed.

Hinton's argument, such as it is, starts with a bit of puzzling over why you never hear people talking about the 2012 apocalypse any more.  (Apparently "it didn't happen" isn't a sufficient reason.)  Hinton finds this highly peculiar, and points out that this was the year CERN fired up the Large Hadron Collider and discovered the Higgs boson, and that this can't possibly be a coincidence.  He wonders if this event destroyed the universe and/or created a black hole, and then "sucked us in" without our being aware of it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lucas Taylor / CERN, CMS Higgs-event, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Me, I think I'd notice if I got sucked into a black hole.  They're kind of violent places, as I described yesterday in my post about Sagittarius A*.  But Hinton isn't nearly done with his explanation.  He writes:

There's the old cliché argument that "nothing has felt right" since 2012.  I agree with this... [E]ver since then the world seems to descend more and more into chaos each day.  Time even feels faster.  There's some sort of calamity happening almost daily.  Mass shootings only stay in the headlines for like 12 hours now.  Did we all die and go to Hell?...  Like I've said, I think we live in a series of simulations.  Perhaps the universe was destroyed by CERN and our collective consciousness was moved into a parallel universe next door.  It would be *almost* identical.

Of course, this is a brilliant opportunity to bring out the Mandela effect, about which I've written before.  The idea of the Mandela effect is that people remember various stuff differently (such as whether Nelson Mandela died in prison, whether it's "Looney Tunes" or "Loony Tunes" and "The Berenstein Bears" or "The Berenstain Bears," and so forth), and the reason for this is not that people's memories in general suck, but that there are alternate universes where these different versions occur and people slip back and forth between them.

All of which makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

What I find intriguing about Hinton's explanation is not all the stuff about CERN, though, but his arguing that the prediction didn't fail because he was wrong, but that the world ended and six-billion-plus people didn't even notice.  Having written here at Skeptophilia for almost nine years, I'm under no illusions about the general intelligence level of humanity, but for fuck's sake, we're not that unobservant.  And even if somehow CERN did create an alternate universe, why would it affect almost nothing except for things like the spelling of Saturday morning cartoon titles?

So this is taking the backfire effect and raising it to the level of performance art.  This is saying that it is more likely that the entire population of the Earth was unaware of a universe-ending catastrophe than it is that you're wrong.

Which is so hubristic that it's kind of impressive.

But I better wind this up, because I've got to prepare myself for the next end of the world, which (according to the late psychic Jeane Dixon) was going to occur in January of 2020.  Which only gives me a few months to get ready.  So many apocalypses, so little time.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone interested in astronomy -- Finding Our Place in the Universe by French astrophysicist Hélène Courtois.  Courtois gives us a thrilling tour of the universe on the largest scales, particularly Laniakea, the galactic supercluster to which the Milky Way belongs, and the vast and completely empty void between Laniakea and the next supercluster.  (These voids are so empty that if the Earth were at the middle of one, there would be no astronomical objects near enough or bright enough to see without a powerful telescope, and the night sky would be completely dark.)

Courtois's book is eye-opening and engaging, and (as it was just published this year) brings the reader up to date with the latest information from astronomy.  And it will give you new appreciation when you look up at night -- and realize how little of the universe you're actually seeing.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Unexpected asymmetry

The question "why are we here?" has vexed scientists and philosophers alike.

The philosophical answers to this are beyond the purview of this blog, and, frankly, beyond my expertise.  I've got a decent background in a lot of areas -- one of the unforeseen benefits of changing one's major over and over -- but philosophy is a subject on which I am unqualified to weigh in.

The scientific twist on this question, however, is equally thorny.  Why is there something rather than nothing?  The current model of the Big Bang Theory predicts with considerable certainty that when the universe formed, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter.  The two are (in a physics sense) symmetrical; every property that matter has, with the exception of mass, antimatter has the opposite.  Positrons (anti-electrons) are positively charges; anti-protons are negative.

The rub is that if you look around the universe, you don't see antimatter.  At all.  Which is, on one level, unsurprising; when matter and antimatter meet, the result is mutual annihilation (and the release of tremendous energy, as per E = mc^2), as any aficionado of Star Trek knows.

In another way, however, this is puzzling.  If matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang, in the intervening years it should all have mutually annihilated, leaving behind nothing but gamma rays.  If the symmetrical production of matter and antimatter is correct, then our universe should be devoid of anything but energy -- and we wouldn't be here to consider the question.

[image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So physicists have been refining their techniques to study antimatter, to see if there's something to account for the imbalance.  Just three days ago, a paper appeared in the journal Nature, by Mostafa Ahmadi of the University of Liverpool et al., called, "Characterization of the 1S-2S Transition in Antihydrogen," in which the team created molecules of antihydrogen -- made of an antiproton and a positron -- to see if it exhibited different properties than ordinary hydrogen.  They did this by creating 90,000 antiprotons, mixing them with five million positrons, and allowing them to form atoms -- then trapping a small number of these in a "magnetic bottle."  (Remember that antimatter violently explodes if it comes into contact with ordinary matter.)

The outcome: antihydrogen seems to behave exactly like ordinary hydrogen.  It emits the same spectral lines (the particular property Ahmadi et al. were studying).  As Aylin Woodward wrote in LiveScience:

As expected, hydrogen and antihydrogen ­— matter and antimatter — behave identically. Now, we just know that they're identical at a measurement of parts per trillion.  However, [coauthor Stefan] Ulmer said the 2-parts-per-trillion measurement does not rule out the possibility that something is deviating between the two types of matter at an even greater level of precision that has thus far defied measurement. 

As for [coauthor Jeffrey] Hangst, he's less concerned with answering the question of why our universe of matter exists as it does without antimatter — what he calls "the elephant in the room."  Instead, he and his group want to focus on making even more precise measurements, and exploring how antimatter reacts with gravity.

The results of this study don't rule out one possibility -- which is that some distant galaxies may actually be composed of antimatter.  As the Ahmadi et al. study shows, it's increasingly unlikely we'd be able to tell that from a distance.  The spectral lines of antihydrogen in an "antisun" would look the same as those of hydrogen from an ordinary star, so there'd be no way to tell unless you went there (which would be unfortunate for you, because you'd explode in a burst of gamma rays).

Whether such an antimatter galaxy would have all of the same people in it, only the good guys would be evil and would have beards, is a matter of conjecture.

But if, as many scientists believe, there really is an imbalance between the amount of matter and antimatter -- if unequal amounts were created during the Big Bang, so during the mutual annihilation that followed, some ordinary matter was left over -- it points to some physics that we haven't even begun to understand.

Which is pretty exciting.  As I pointed out in yesterday's post, unanswered questions are the bread-and-butter of scientific research.  The team is hoping to have even more precise measurements made by the end of 2018, at which point CERN is shutting down for two years for upgrades.  As Jeffrey Hangst put it, "We have other tricks up our sleeve.  Stay tuned."

Which even Evil Spock would have approved of, I think.

False vacuum catastrophe

It's odd how enamored people are of things that could destroy the entire universe.

I mean, on one level I get it.  The sheer power of the natural world is pretty awe-inspiring, and as I've mentioned before, if I hadn't become a mild-mannered high school biology teacher, I definitely would have been a a tornado chaser.  That same love of extreme danger (especially when it's not you experiencing it) explains shows like The Deadliest Catch and the innumerable quasi-documentaries wherein divers swim around in chum-filled waters and still seem surprised when they're attacked by sharks.

But on a larger scale, there's a real curiosity about things that could wipe out pretty much everything.  A while back, I wrote a piece about people sounding gleeful that we might be looking down the gun barrel of a gamma-ray burster (we're not), and over and over we've heard alarmists suggesting that CERN was going to create a black hole that would eat the Earth (it's not).  But that doesn't begin to exhaust the ways in which we all could die in horrible agony.

Which brings us to the concept of the false vacuum.

Sounds harmless enough, doesn't it?  Well, this is in the long tradition of physicists giving seriously weird things cutesy names, like "strange quarks" and "glueballs."

The idea of the false vacuum is that the universe is currently in a "metastable state."  What this means is that right now we're in a locally stable configuration, but if something destabilizes us a little bit, we might find ourselves suddenly plunging into a more stable state -- a "true vacuum."  The situation, then would be similar to that of the little ball in the graph below:

As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, the ball is stable; but if something gives it a push up the hill in the middle, it'll crest the hill and find itself rushing downward into a more stable position -- the "true vacuum."

Why this concerns anyone but the physicists is that the result of our reconfiguring into a true vacuum would be that a bubble would form, rushing outward at the speed of light, and destroying everything in its path.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics suggests that from the mass of the Higgs boson and the top quark, an estimate could be made of just how likely this is.  Writer Robert Walker concludes, from the research of Joseph Lykken and others, that the answer is "not very:"

[I]f it could happen, then you’d expect it to have happened already in the first 1/10,000,000,000th of a second along with the other symmetry breaking when gravity split off from the other forces, when it was tremendously hot... 

Since that hasn’t happened, the false vacuum has to be very stable, or else, probably as we find new physics we find out that it is not in a false vacuum state at all. 

And yes, on the basis of the measured mass of the Higgs boson, the false vacuum has to be very stable.  Joseph Lykken says that an event that triggers a patch of true vacuum, if the theory is correct, happens on average once every 10, 000, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion years. 

That means it is nothing to be worried about.

Walker, who is a mathematician, says that the likelihood of a true vacuum bubble occurring in any given century is less than the likelihood of purchasing tickets for twelve consecutive Euromillions lotteries, and winning the jackpot for all of them.

So "don't worry about it" seems to be an understatement.

However, that hasn't stopped the alarmists from freaking out about it, probably largely due to the fact that if it did happen, it would be pretty catastrophic.  Also, because a lot of them seem to feel that the physicists (for this, read "mad scientists") are actively trying to trigger the creation of a true vacuum, which would be an idiotic thing to do even if it were possible because they'd be the first ones to get vaporized, and wouldn't even have the pleasure of standing around rubbing their hands together and cackling maniacally for more than about a microsecond.

But then there are the ones who think that it could happen accidentally (again, because of CERN, of course), and the physicists are simply being reckless, not suicidal.  I tend to agree with Walker, though.  I'm way more worried about the idiotic things humans are currently doing to the environment, and our determination to slaughter each other over things like who has the best Invisible Friend, than I am about triggering the Scary Bubble of Death.

Anyhow.  That's our Terrifying Thing That Can Kill you for today, along with some soothing words about why it's not very likely.  Now you'll have to excuse me, because I'm gonna go have a pint of beer and watch Twister for the 17th time.

Give me a break...

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the Mandela Effect, which is the idea that when you remember some major event differently than other people, it's not because your memory is wrong, it's because you have side-slipped here from an alternate universe where the version you remember actually happened.  The phenomenon gets its name from the fact that a lot of people "remember" that Nelson Mandela died in jail decades ago, which of course didn't happen.  These same folks are the ones who make an enormous deal over "remembering" that the Berenstain Bears -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as "Your parents and teachers are always right about everything" -- were originally the Berenstein Bears.

Why their name would be different in an alternate universe, I don't know.  From watching Star Trek and Lost in Space, I always assumed that the major differences you'd find in an alternate universe is that all of the good guys would be bad guys, and because of that, many of them would be wearing beards.

But the Mandela Effect isn't going away, despite the fact that if you believe it you're basically saying that your memory is 100% accurate, all of the time, and that you have never misremembered anything in your life.  The whole thing has become immensely popular to "study" -- although what there is there to study, I don't know.  Witness the fact that there is now a subreddit (/r/MandelaEffect) with almost thirty thousand subscribers.

The most recent thing to be brought to light by this cadre of timeline-jumpers has to do with the "Kit Kat" candy bar.  Apparently many people recall the name from their childhood as being "Kit Kats" (with an "s"), even though that doesn't really work with the candy's irritating ear-worm of a jingle, "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar."  So once again, it's more likely that you're in an alternate universe than you just aren't recalling the name of a candy bar correctly.  And now we have someone who has proposed an explanation as to why all of this is happening.

You ready?

The Mandela Effect is caused by...

... CERN.

Yes, CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, home of the Large Hadron Collider, which became famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up last year.  CERN has been the target of woo-woo silliness before now; back in 2009, projects had to be sidelined for months while the mechanism was repaired after a seagull dropped a piece of a baguette onto some electrical wires and caused a short, and the woo-woos decided that the seagull had been sent back in time to destroy the LHC before it destroyed the entire universe.

So I guess there's no end to what CERN can do, up to and including vaporizing specific letters off of candy bar wrappers.  But you know, if CERN can alter our timeline, don't you think there's more important stuff that it could accomplish besides changing the spellings of candy bars and cartoon bears?  First thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Donald Trump's father a condom.

But I might be a little biased in that regard.

What baffles me about all of this is that not only is there abundant evidence that human memory is plastic and fallible, but just from our own experience you'd think there would be hundreds of examples where we'd clearly recalled things incorrectly.  The fact that these people have to invent an "effect" that involves alternate universes to support why they're always right takes hubris to the level of an art form.

So anyway.  I'm not too worried about the possibility of my having side-slipped from another timeline where I was a world-famous author whose novels regularly rocket to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.  I'm more concerned at the moment over how the hell I'm going to get the "Kit Kat" jingle out of my head, because that thing is really fucking annoying.

Tactical assault weasel

So the Large Hadron Collider is having problems again, this time because a weasel chewed through a power cord and shut down the whole operation.

I am not making this up.  Nor is this the first time that an animal has wrought havoc with the world's largest particle accelerator.  In 2009, a gull dropped a baguette on "critical electrical systems," and shorted the whole thing out, causing damage that required several months to repair.

These sorts of things have caused an immediate bout of eyebrow-raising amongst the woo-woos, who tend to have the belief that nothing happens by accident.  If oddball problems arise, then it is not simply because the world is a bizarre and chaotic place (an observation that in my opinion explains a good 90% of the weird events that happen).  It is an indication of a conspiracy, or a bad omen at the very least.

And the fact that twice, animals have shut down the LHC?  That can't be happenstance.

And as I predicted, already the wingnuts are beginning to ferment with speculation regarding the possible explanations for the recent Weasel Attack.  Here are a few selected comments from online news sources that carried the story:

• What would make a weasle [sic] eat a power cord?  There's something they're not telling us.
• This isn't the only time this has happened.  A few years ago a seagull damaged the Large Hardon [sic] collider and now its [sic] happened again.  Nature and God are trying to tell us something that we are not supposed to be doing this.  What happens when its [sic] fixed and started up and something goes wrong?  We should take this to mean that the Large Hardon [sic] collider should be shut down permanently.
• Some scientists believe that this is happening because in the future CERN has created a black hole or something else bad, and they're sending us messages back in time to stop us.  We better listen.
• We sink billions of dollars into something a weasel can destroy.  How fucking stupid are we?
• Once was a weird thing to happen.  Twice is too much to be a coincidence.

Okay, let me address a few of these points.

• Why does a weasel eating a power cord mean there's "something they're not telling us?"  As far as I can see, all it means is "a weasel ate a power cord."
• I'm sorry, but the mental image I get whenever someone writes CERN's facility as "the Large Hardon Collider" is so hilarious that I can't even stay serious long enough to consider anything else they might say.  I may have a juvenile sense of humor, but there you are.
• As far as how fucking stupid we are, as a species, I think you can find a whole lot of pieces of evidence along those lines other than building a piece of expensive and fragile equipment.  There are far better examples to choose from of how fucking stupid we are.
• When one weird thing happens, it can't be a coincidence, because a "coincidence" is when two similar events coincide.  Thus the name.
• If CERN created a black hole in the future, my guess is that there wouldn't be an Earth around at that point, much less scientists to send a Tactical Assault Weasel back in time to stop it from happening.

Doesn't this have the look of a time-traveling vandal from the future?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, Arnaud Marsollier, head of press for CERN, has said that the repairs will only take a couple of weeks.  The Large Hadron [note the spelling] Collider should be back online, and ready to smash atoms and/or end the universe as we know it, by mid-May.

Unless the scientists in the future send some other animal emissary back in time to wreck it again.  Maybe this time with a highly-trained Military Attack Wombat with a strategic banana peel.  You can see how effective that would  be.

Remembrance of things past

In the movie Memento, the main character, a fellow named Leonard Shelby, has anterograde amnesia, a brain disorder that prevents the formation of new short-term memories.  He forms his knowledge of the world from labeled Polaroid snapshots of people, and (for really important things) information that he has tattooed on his own skin.  The problem is, because he has no ability to reference memories of those people and events, he doesn't know if what he has written on the photographs and on himself is true -- if he was wrong, or being lied to, when he wrote the information down.

It's a fantastic, but highly unsettling, film.  Our worlds are made of a skein of remembered events, and without that network of referents, we are completely adrift.

The problem is that even for those of us who do not suffer from anterograde amnesia, what we remember is far less reliable than we think it is.  Consider that even those of us who admit "I have a terrible memory" are still quite convinced that what they do remember of the past is accurate.

And they should not be.  None of us should be.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole topic comes up because of a ridiculous claim sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  In it, a rather hysterical sounding guy tells us that the scientists at CERN have gone back in time and altered the past so as to change the title of Interview with a Vampire to Interview with the Vampire.   As evidence, he shows us that the top search words beginning with "interview with" are "interview with a vampire."  Q.e.d., apparently.

As for why CERN physicists would bother to do such a thing, the narrator says, "Maybe it's just a test.  I dunno."  But whatever the reason, his two-minute video sure struck a chord with some people. Amongst the comments we find:

Its [sic] interview with a vampire!!!!!  i remember it distinctly and clearly..... when i checked google after watching your video i got goose bumps, felt strange..... if you search for cached files on google its listed as 'A' vampire on an old Amazon link, and there are some old videos posted with the title 'Interview with a vampire 2'..... in the words of Tom Baker "somethings [sic] going on contrary to the laws of time!, i must find out what!!"

and

this is totally fucked up whats [sic] going on I am really scared...  what really really scares me is how some of us remember it the other way cause that means some of use [sic] are being manipulated and they changed our thinking some how and we don't know... but the caches support our old claims cause if it was always the new alternate reality the old searches for the proper names would not be cached in the search engines... 

The possibility of simply misremembering is apparently much more far-fetched to these people.

And the problem is that all of us misremember.  A lot.  Lawrence Patihis, a psychological researcher at the University of California-Irvine, found that even people with "Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory" -- the rare individuals who can tell you what they wore, did, and ate for breakfast on October 23, 2004 -- still get it wrong some of the time.   For their ordinary memories (at least the ones that can be cross-checked against hard evidence), they have a three-percent failure rate; but when they are presented with information that deliberately screws around with their recollections, they end up with false/implanted memories 20% of the time.  Here's how science writer Erika Hayasaki describes the experiment:

Twenty people with such memory were shown slideshows featuring a man stealing a wallet from a woman while pretending to help her, and then a man breaking into a car with a credit card and stealing $1 bills and necklaces.  Later, they read two narratives about those slideshows containing misinformation.  When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory. 

In another test, subjects were told there was news footage of the plane crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, even though no actual footage exists.  When asked whether they remembered having seen the footage before, 20 percent of subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory indicated they had, compared to 29 percent of people with regular memory. 

“Even though this study is about people with superior memory, this study should really make people stop and think about their own memory,” Patihis said.  “Gone are the days when people thought that [only] maybe 20, 30 or 40 percent of people are vulnerable to memory distortions.”

The bottom line is that even the best of us have unreliable memories, which puts the rest of us slobs straight into "You're probably remembering almost everything incompletely and incorrectly" territory.  It's a frightening conclusion; what we remember seems so solid, so incontrovertible, that it's hard to imagine that what is in our memory centers is an amalgam of actual fact, stuff we were told by others, and stuff that we spun straight from whole cloth.  And without anything to compare it to, we're not much better off than Leonard Shelby with his photographs and tattoos.

So there's no need to accuse the scientists at CERN of going back in time to change one word in a book title.  First off, they have many better things to do, such as creating black holes to destroy the Earth and developing targeted weather death rays to send hurricanes to places that strangely enough always get hurricanes anyway.  It's not that we don't know that people forget things or get things wrong... it's just that we get uncomfortable when we realize that our memories are far worse than we like to admit.

The end of the world as we know it

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we're all gonna die.

Sorry if that's kind of a downer of a way to start your morning.  But it's best to face facts, you know?

Some time in the next week, according to multiple sources, god is going to play a game of cosmic Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  Never mind that none of those sources have any apparent understanding of astronomy, nor necessarily even contact with reality.  Just believe 'em anyway, because what do those cocky fancy-pants scientists know, anyway?

First we have Pastor John Hagee, whose motto is "Jesus accepts MasterCard."  This guy has made a career out of passing along the cheerful message that god thinks we're all sinners and we're doomed to the fiery furnace and the only way to escape our (well deserved) fate is if we make a generous donation to John Hagee Ministries so that John Hagee can purchase another Yacht for Christ.  (Why Christ needs a yacht remains to be seen.  Didn't the dude walk on water?)

This time, though, god is serious, and he's going to show us how pissed he is at our iniquity through an unequivocal sign: a lunar eclipse this Sunday.  Or, as Hagee likes to put it, a "blood moon."  Because the moon turns kind of red during an eclipse, which means blood.  And god and prophecy and hell and all the rest, so you damn well better give generously, or else.

Is it just me, or does Pastor Hagee look really... happy about the whole thing?  You get the impression that here's a guy who is just thrilled that Rivers Will Run Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.  After all, the unbelievers don't donate to John Hagee Ministries, so fuck 'em, right?

But it isn't just Hagee saying that we're in trouble.  A lot of folks down in Costa Rica are up in arms over the appearance a couple of days ago of a weird cloud, because there's obviously no other explanation for this other than the imminent end of the world.

Eladio Solano, meteorologist at Costa Rica's National Meteorological Institute, said the phenomenon is rare but perfectly natural.  The iridescence, he says, is caused by the refraction of light through high ice crystals in the atmosphere, and has happened before without the world ending.  But what does he know?  He's just a scientist.  We all know it's better to get your information from superstition based on a Bronze-Age understanding of the universe.

Then we have the fact that the physicists over at CERN are firing up the Large Hadron Collider today, and the rumor has started that they're trying to "recreate the Big Bang."  The result will be that the new Bang will rip the current universe apart from the inside out.  And/or create a black hole.  Either way, we're pretty much fucked.

Because that's what all scientists are after, right?  When they're not busy distracting you from the actual meaning of weird clouds over Costa Rica, they're plotting to destroy the world.  Why else would they have gone into science?

And if that wasn't enough to ruin your morning, add to that the fact that Mercury goes into retrograde starting on Thursday.  And this means that all hell is going to break loose on Earth, even though (1) it's only an apparent backwards movement because of the relative motion of Mercury as seen from Earth, (2) the movement of a planet against a backdrop of impossibly distant stars has zero to do with anything happening down here, and (3) Mercury goes into retrograde three times every year, and the world hasn't ended any of those times.

But never mind all that logic and rationality stuff.  This time it's gonna happen.  Blood moons + weird clouds + LHC + Mercury retrograde = really bad shit.  You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that.

In fact, it's better if you're not a scientist at all.

ConCERNed

There's a fundamental distrust of science and scientists on the part of a large number of Americans.  I think it's probably a left-over trope from the depiction of scientists as crazy sociopaths in a lot of science fiction movies; or, perhaps, the trope itself comes from a deeper and older mistrust, generated by watching the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and wondering what other awful weapons the researchers might be working on next.

Of course, the paranoia can be blown away by a little bit of effective science education.  But as we've seen over and over again, effective science education isn't really all that common.

So instead, we end up with people like the prolific YouTube contributor "BPEarthWatch," who is "Dedicated to Watching the End Time Events that Lead to the Return of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Comets, Asteroids, Earth Quakes, Solar Flares and The End Time Powers."

I ran into this fellow because of my son, Nathan, who sent me a link to the following video:

In it, BPEarthWatch informs us that the research out at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) is going to screw up the magnetic field of the Earth and kill us all.

We're put on notice that the narrator may be a little shaky in his understanding of physics when he informs us that (1) it's a problem that the Earth's magnetic field lines are squiggly "like spaghetti," and that (2) Mars "lost its magnetic field and its atmosphere because of a close pass with a comet."  I realize that understanding planetary magnetic fields as generated by the rotation of a solid magnetic inner core within a fluid outer core is kind of complicated, but when I run into something that is complicated, I take some time to figure it out instead of just blathering on as if I knew what I was talking about.

Not so our friend BPEarthWatch.  Armed with his squiggly spaghetti and his scary talk about Mars, he goes on to tell us that the scientists at CERN are going to fire up the Large Hadron Collider, and it will "open up a stargate" and "destroy the magnetic field of the Earth" which will cause us to be bombarded by "ultraviolet x-ray radiation and other type [sic] of solar and galactic proton burst."

Part of the detector array for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You have to wonder why he doesn't consider the fact that scientists, when they're not cackling wildly over their bubbling flasks and lightning-producing wires, have families and lives and hobbies and homes and so forth, and would not really have all that much incentive to do something that would leave the Earth without a magnetic field (or atmosphere).  He makes it clear that this isn't just scientific overreach and an ignorance of the consequences; he states outright that the CERN scientists know perfectly well what they're doing, and don't care that they're going to make the planet uninhabitable in the process.

Of course, his delivery style doesn't help matters.  It was also Nathan who pointed out that BPEarthWatch sounds exactly like the character Harlan Pepper in Best in Show:

Be that as it may, BPEarthWatch is still better than the guy who wrote a piece because he was freaked out by the potential of the Large Hadron Collider to create a black hole, and throughout the whole thing called it the "Large Hardon Collider."

It's really not that difficult, folks.  Learn some science.  Find out what the scientists at CERN are actually doing.  (It's cool stuff, I promise.)  Just because science can be a little complicated at times doesn't mean that scientists are "out of control... like mad scientists in an ol' Frankenstein movie."

On the other hand, I wouldn't object if the scientists could come up with a stargate.  Getting from one planet to another in seconds would be awesome.  I'd definitely volunteer to go through it, even if it means hanging around with Kurt Russell and meeting the Egyptian god Ra, who turns out to be a creepy shirtless teenage boy with glowing eyes.

ConCERNing Osiris

Many of you undoubtedly know about CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the world's largest particle physics laboratory, located on the border of France and Switzerland.  It's home to six particle accelerators and some of the most impressive discoveries in subatomic and high-energy physics in the world, including last year's demonstration of the existence of the elusive Higgs field, the field that confers the property of mass to every bit of matter in the universe.

Pretty impressive stuff, and most of it over my head even given my bachelor's degree in physics.

Now, switch gears for a moment.  You'll see why in a bit.

Many of you undoubtedly also know about Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, although perhaps not the same ones who knew about CERN.  Osiris was one of the most important gods in ancient Egypt, given their fixation on the afterlife.  Unlike his fellow deities, who had animals' heads, Osiris looked pretty much like an ordinary guy, except that he had green skin.

Osiris became the god of rebirth when he was killed by his brother Set, who chopped his body up and threw it into the Nile river.  Osiris's wife Isis found her husband, in chunks, and sort of stuck the chunks back together and brought him back to life, only to find out afterwards that there was a chunk missing.  Unfortunately for Osiris, that chunk turned out to be a body part that most of us males are pretty fond of, if you get my drift.  Understandably upset at his wife for not finding a fairly important bit of him, he convinced Isis to make him a new one out of gold, which strikes me as a pretty poor substitute, all things considered.  But it must have worked, because soon after Isis gave birth to the god Horus, who looked just like his parents hoped except for the possible problem of having a falcon's head.

Then Osiris died again.  Poor guy just couldn't catch a break.

Now, by this time you're probably wondering what CERN and Osiris can possibly have to do with one another.  So let me explain.  CERN, you see, isn't just a place where physicists go to conduct complex and far-reaching experiments about the subtle structure of matter; it is actually a portal whose chief purpose is to create a wormhole, which will allow Osiris to be raised from the dead.

Again.  Hopefully they'll remember to bring along his penis this time.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article over at UFO Sightings Hotspot, called "Ta-Wer AKA Osiris AKA CERN."  Here's the main argument, if I can dignify it by that name:

According to researcher William Henry, the ancient Egyptian object named Ta-Wer aka “Osiris” device, was a stargate machine capable to open wormholes or dimensional openings used by Seth and Osiris to “travel across the underworld.”Is CERN the new “Osiris Ta-Wer”? A modern stargate machine based on ancient technology?

When work at CERN's Large Hadron Collider is completed in 2015, the collider should have twice the power and be able to help unlock more of the universe's mysteries and to explore an entirely new realm of physics.

With the LHC power doubled, they will start looking for what they think is out there and they hope that something will turn up that no one had ever thought of.

It is known that the secret societies are obsessed with the raising of Osiris and maybe they already know what they are looking for and was the placement of a Shiva Statue outside the CERN Hadron Collider a hint?

Sure.  Because a green-skinned Egyptian god and a multi-armed Hindu god are clearly the same guy.  But do go on:

According to Stephen Hawking: “ bending space-time is theoretically possible— by exploiting black holes, or wormholes if they exist, or by traveling at super speeds, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Although many people believe that time travel is science fiction, it is not, and taking into account the obsession of the illuminati to use CERN as a stargate machine, it may be possible in the near future, we will face God’s miracles as seen by the ancient Hindu people when their Gods travelling through stargate devices. 

You know, if I were Stephen Hawking, I would be really pissed at the way nutjobs use quotes from legitimate research, lectures, and interviews to support their bizarre ideas.  These guys cherry-pick almost as much as the fundamentalist Christians do.  And at least the evangelical Christians basically understand the stuff they're reading.  With articles like this one, though, you get the impression that the folks that write this sort of woo-woo horse waste have about as much actual comprehension of quantum mechanics as my dog.

They end, though, with a question:

Is there some occult ritual being carried within the LHC facility and is Shiva the one they are attempting to bring to Earth?

No and no.  Thanks for asking.  And once again, Shiva and Osiris aren't the same dude.  By no stretch of the imagination is a three-eyed, eight-armed dude wearing a necklace of skulls even remotely like a green-skinned bearded dude with a missing wang.  Are we clear on that now?

 And CERN has nothing to do with gods of any kind.  They do physics there.  End of story.

It's a regrettable tendency on the part of a lot of people to hear bits and pieces of stuff they don't understand, combine it with other stuff they only partially understand, and come to drastically wrong conclusions.  The cure, of course, is to try and find out a little about the actual facts, to learn some real science, but that, unfortunately, is a level of hard work that some people are unwilling to undertake.  So we haven't seen the end of this kind of thing.

Woo-woo wingnuttery, it seems, will be with us always, sort of like death and taxes but even more annoying.