Apocalypse ongoing

A while back, I wrote about the strange and disheartening research by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, the upshot of which is that frequently when there is powerful evidence against a deeply-held belief, the result is that the belief gets stronger.

It's called the backfire effect.  The Festinger et al. study looked at a cult that centered around a belief that the world was going to end on a very specific date.  When the Big Day arrived, the cult members assembled at the leader's house to await the end.  Many were in severe emotional distress.  At 11:30 P.M., the leader -- perhaps sensing things weren't going the way he thought they would -- secluded himself to pray.  And at five minutes till midnight, he came out of his room with the amazing news that because of their faith and piety, God told him he'd decided to spare the world after all.

The astonishing part is that the followers didn't do what I would have done, which is to tell the leader, "You are either a liar or a complete loon, and I am done with you."  They became even more devoted to him.  Because, after all, without him instructing them to keep the vigil, God would have destroyed the world, right?

Of course right.

The peculiar fact-resistance a lot of people have can reach amazing lengths, as I found out when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago having to do with the fact that people are still blathering on about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse.  Remember that?  Supposedly the Mayan Long Count Calendar indicated that one of their long time-cycles (b'ak'tuns) was going to end on December 21, 2012, and because of that there was going to be absolute chaos.  Some people thought it would be the literal end of the world; the more hopeful types thought it would be some kind of renewal or Celestial Ascension that would mark the beginning of a new spiritual regime filled with peace, love, and harmony.

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- the fact that if you talked to actual Mayan scholars, they told you that the interpretation of the Long Count Calendar was dependent not only on translations of uncertain accuracy, but an alignment of that calendar with our own that could have been off in either direction by as much as fifty years.  Plus, there was no truth to the claim that the passage into the next b'ak'tun was anything more than a benchmark, same as going from December 31 to January 1.

Mostly what I remember about the Mayan Apocalypse is that evening, my wife and I threw an End-of-the-World-themed costume party.

Although the party was a smashing success, what ended up happening apocalypse-wise was... nothing.  December 22, 2012 dawned, and everyone just kept loping along as usual.  There were no asteroid impacts, nuclear wars, or alien invasions, and the giant tsunami that crested over the Himalayas in the catastrophically bad movie 2012 never showed up.

Which is a shame, because I have to admit that was pretty cool-looking.

So -- huge wind-up, with thousands of people weighing in, and then bupkis.  What's an apocalyptoid to do, in the face of that?

Well, according to the article my friend sent -- their response has been sort of along the lines of Senator George Aiken's solution to the Vietnam War: "Declare victory and go home."  Apparently there is a slice of true believers who think that the answer to the apocalypse not happening back in 2012 is that...

... the apocalypse did too happen.

I find this kind of puzzling.  I mean, if the world ended, you'd think someone would have noticed.  But that, they say, is part of how we know it actually happened.  Otherwise, why would we all be so oblivious?

The parallels to Festinger et al. are a little alarming.

The mechanisms of how all this worked are, unsurprisingly, a little sketchy.  Some think we dropped past the event horizon of a black hole and are now in a separate universe from the one we inhabited pre-2012.  Others think that we got folded into a Matrix-style simulation, and this is an explanation for the Mandela effect.  A common theme is that it has something to do with the discovery by CERN of the Higgs boson, which also happened in 2012 and therefore can't be a coincidence.

Some say it's significant that ever since then, time seems to be moving faster, so we're hurtling ever more quickly toward... something.  They're a little fuzzy on this part.  My question, though, is if time did speed up, how could we tell?  The only way you'd notice is if time in one place sped up by comparison to time in a different place, which is not what they're claiming.  They say that time everywhere is getting faster, to which I ask: getting faster relative to what, exactly?

In any case, the whole thing makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So that's our dive in the deep end for the day.  No need to worry about the world ending, because it already did.  The good news is that we seem to be doing okay despite that, if you discount the possibility that we could be inside a black hole.

Me, I'm not going to fret about it.  I've had enough on my mind lately.  Besides, if the apocalypse happened eleven years ago, there's nothing more to be apprehensive about, right?

Of course right.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 decades ago, not peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  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 Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e" instead of an "a").

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 justly famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up a few years ago.  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 blew up 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?  If I could alter the past, first thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Tucker Carlson'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'm 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.

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

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.

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

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!]

Multiverse massacre

By now, most of you have heard about the Bowling Green Massacre, a horrific attack by Iraqi immigrant terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway cited as yet another reason we shouldn't accept Muslim immigrants into the United States.  "I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre," Conway said.  "Most people don't know that because it didn't get covered."

Well, as everyone in the United States, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, knows by now is that the reason it didn't get covered is that it never happened.  Kellyanne Conway, whose job description seems to include "make up random shit if it supports what Trump is currently doing," eventually admitted that she'd "made an honest mistake," which is apparently how this administration is labeling outright, bald-faced lies.  The admission, however, didn't stop her from being excoriated on social media.

And also:

Or, best of all, if you'd prefer a twofer:

But because there's no story so weird that people can't work together to make it way weirder, just a couple of days ago claims began popping up on woo-woo websites claiming that yes, actually there was a Bowling Green Massacre, it just happened in an alternate timeline that for some reason only a few of us remember.

Thus, we can add the Bowling Green Massacre to the Berenstain Bears and Nelson Mandela's untimely death as another example of... the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect, you probably know, is a phenomenon wherein someone (or several someones) recalls the past differently than the rest of us, and rather than doing what most of us do, which is to say, "Huh.  I guess I'm remembering wrong, then," said individuals decide that what happened is they have side-slipped into our world from an alternate path in the multiverse in which the event in question (such as the annoyingly moralistic cartoon bears being the Berenstein, rather than Berenstain, Bears) actually is reality.

Here's how one commenter describes his confusion over the imaginary Massacre:

I know the press is (unfairly?) hammering Kellyanne Conway about this and everyone just assumes she made it up, but does anyone else remember an actual Bowling Green Massacre? 

And I’m not talking about the arms smuggling scheme or whatever that all of the articles I’ve read seem to think she might have been talking about.  I mean an actual, honest-to-goodness terrorist attack. 

I definitely recall a bombing in Bowling Green that killed … maybe a dozen people?  I think it happened either at the end of the Bush administration or the first month of the Obama administration.  I’m pretty sure it involved a suicide bomb being set off on a city bus.  The way I remember it was a young Muslim guy–he could have been in his late teens, possibly early twenties? (I’m ashamed to admit this, but I remember seeing his pictures on the news and thinking he was kind of cute.)  He hid an IED inside a dufflebag or knapsack or something and I think he detonated it using an ipod or some kind of portable music player. 

Later, they arrested a second, older Muslim guy.  I think he was responsible for building the bomb.  They were definitely both Iraqi refugees, like Conway said.

Which all sounds pretty persuasive, except for the fact that -- allow me to reiterate -- none of it happened.  But dozens of people chimed in about how yeah, they remember it too, and they added more details about the attackers and the victims and the aftermath, and the whole thing is showing every sign of snowballing.

So I guess there is no end to the mental gymnastics people will go through to avoid being wrong about stuff.  Me, I tend to agree more with Neil deGrasse Tyson: "We have a high opinion of our own brain as a data processing device, when in fact we should not."  Experiment after experiment have shown that our recollection of the past is incomplete at best and full of false memories at worst.  For me, the Ockham's Razor-ish explanation requiring the least ad hoc assumptions is that we're really prone to remembering things wrong, and some of us (e.g. Kellyanne Conway) make the problem significantly worse by inventing new fake stuff to confuse us further.

Of course, there'll be those that disagree with me.  The multiverse is real, and there's a parallel timeline in which Kellyanne Conway doesn't lie every time she opens her mouth.  Those of us who don't recall the Massacre simply live in what one person referred to as a "BGM-null universe."

Or, as I like to think of it, reality.

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.

Many worlds

I've always had a fairly good memory -- for certain things, at least.  I usually lecture my classes without notes, for example.  I find that it keeps my teaching fluid, much more so than it would be if I were just reading from a script.  (Every once in a while, though, the technique fails me, and I have to check something, or simply can't remember a particular term -- an occurrence I'm finding ever more common as I mosey my way through my 50s.)

At the same time, though, I'm constantly aware of how plastic and unreliable human memory is.  We form impressions of events, and sometimes those impressions are actually very far from correct.  The odd thing is that these pseudomemories don't seem inaccurate, or fuzzy.  My personal experience is that memories which are flat wrong seem perfectly solid -- until someone points out that facts demonstrate conclusively that what I'm remembering can't be correct.

It is this seeming certainty that is puzzling, and sometimes alarming.  A study back in 2005 by James Ost, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Portsmouth (England), demonstrated all of this with frightening clarity.  Ost took a group of volunteers in England and in Sweden, and asked them if they'd seen CCTV footage of the 2005 Tavistock Square bombing, when in fact no such footage exists.  50% of the Swedish participants said they had, and a full 84% of the English ones did!  Further, when Ost asked the volunteers who had responded "yes" for details about the video footage, they gave surprising amounts of information.  Ost asked one participant, "Was the bus moving when the bomb went off?" and received the following response: "The bus had just stopped to let two people off, when two women got on, and a man.  He placed the bag by his side, the woman sat down and doors closed.  As the bus left there was an explosion and then everyone started to scream."

So, as unsettling as it seems, a lot of what we remember didn't happen that way, or perhaps didn't happen at all.  Not a pleasant thought, but it seems like it's pretty universal to the way the human mind works.

Ost's study makes what I ran across yesterday all the more bizarre.  On a website called "The Mandela Effect," we are introduced to a woman named Fiona Broome, whose interest lies in exactly the sort of memory side-slips that Ost researched.  Her curiosity about such occurrences started when she realized how many of her acquaintances "remembered" that Nelson Mandela had died in jail -- even recalled details of his funeral from news stories they'd read.  But instead of coming to Ost's conclusion, which is that human memory is simply unreliable, Broome has reached a different explanation.

Broome thinks that these represent memories accessed from alternate realities.

"That’s not a conspiracy theory," Broome writes.  "It’s related to alternate history and parallel realities.  Exploring the quantum / 'Sliders' concept further, I discovered an entire world of shifting realities that people try to reconcile daily...  These aren’t simple errors in memory; they seem to be fully-constructed incidents (or sequential events) from the past.  They exceed the normal range of forgetfulness.  Even stranger, other people seem to have identical memories."

What are these "identical memories" that many people supposedly share?  They include:

• The deaths of Billy Graham, actors Henry Winkler, Shirley Temple, and David Soul, and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
• Plots and various other details on Mystery Science Theater and Star Trek: Voyager.
• Details and release dates of the movies Avatar and Terminator.
• Various PS1 games that don't exist.
• The locations of New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

And apparently, Fiona Broome and the others of her mindset actually think that all of this is better explained by their somehow accessing an "alternate universe" than it is by their simply not remembering stuff correctly.

Even if you buy the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics -- a conjecture which is far from settled amongst physicists, however many plots of science fiction movies depend on its being correct -- there's absolutely no reason to believe that we still have access to alternate timelines once splitting has occurred.  If that were true, and people could jump back and forth between universes, it kind of throws the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy right out of the window.  And that law pairs up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as two of the most fundamental building blocks of our understanding of the universe, and -- more importantly -- they are two laws for which no exception has ever been shown.

[image of "Schrödinger's Cat and Universe Branching" courtesy of Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

Even ardent many-worlds supporters like Hugh Everett and John Archibald Wheeler believed that once the timeline has forked, the two universes are permanently sealed off from one another.  No information, much less matter and energy, can get from one to the other, which means that if many-worlds is right, there's no way to prove it (this, in fact, is one of the main objections from detractors).  So even though timeline-jumping is a central trope in my novel Lock & Key, I am very much of the opinion that the entire idea rests on a physical impossibility (which is why the novel is filed in the "fiction" section).

Sadly, this leaves Fiona Broome et al. kind of getting sliced to ribbons by Ockham's Razor.  Bit of a shame, really, because it would be cool if we could get a glimpse of alternate universes.  It brings to mind a quote from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian:

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No. Nobody is ever told that."

It may well be that Broome's conjecture is more appealing than Ost's is; that our memory lapses represent the glittering remains of sideward steps into other worlds instead of simple neural failures.  But unfortunately, Ost's conclusion lines up better with the evidence.  Other studies, showing how easy it is to implant false memories, and how completely convincing those pseudomemories seem, indicate that what's really happening is that we are creating our recollections as we go, and some of them are simply invented from bits and pieces, from suggestions, or out of thin air.

The world, it seems, is far more solid than our memory of it.  So if Sri Lanka appears to have moved to the southeast, as some people apparently believe, then it's much more likely that you simply don't remember your geography very well than it is that you've had a glimpse of an alternate Earth in which the island is anchored elsewhere.