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Get out your tinfoil hats! Have you heard your kids mention the Mandela Effect? This common-but-out-there theory is about to dominate the internet again, and you’ll be one step ahead by reading up on what’s going on with the Particle Collider in Switzerland.
This week, the brilliant pranksters at CERN (derived from the French translation of The European Organization for Nuclear Research) are powering on the particle collider in their Swiss Home Base. The Large Hadron Collider, a very big and very fancy machine for accelerating photons, has made waves almost every time it’s been switched on in the last decade.
Yes, it’s a little disconcerting that CERN’s logo looks an awful lot like the numbers 666, and that they were under fire for literally simulating a human sacrifice to a deity of death in 2016, but it’s highly unlikely that in the course of the pursuit of progressing particle physics that they’re actually trying to open a portal to another dimension.
But that’s not going to stop the internet from thinking they are!
The Mandela effect is one such theory that’s risen from the conspiracy caves of the World Wide Web (fun fact, the Web actually originated at CERN in 1989), and oh boy is it a doozy. The quick recap is that thousands (perhaps more) of people vividly remember the South African Anti-Apartheid leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80’s, when in fact he was released in 1990 and lived for decades after. Since this initial conspiracy theory, several notable examples have arisen and stuck.
For example, was it the Berenstein Bears or the Berenstain Bears? People swear doggedly on one or the other. And the Fruit of the Loom logo – did it ever feature a cornucopia? YES IT DID, screams half the world. What about JIF peanut butter – was it ever called JIFFY?
YEAH HUH, some angry PB enthusiasts roar.
It’s probably easier to explain to your kids that the human memory is extremely fallible, or that dual patents exist, or that printing errors are a thing – it’s got to be a tough conversation, diving into the multiverse. Admittedly, things have been very weird in this timeline for the past few years, basically since the particle collider was first switched on. It makes sense that kids, who admittedly aren’t very plugged into particle physics, could see this experimentation as shadowy or nefarious.
But what do you think? Is CERN tearing open space-time? By the time you read this, we could be in a new timeline altogether! Kanye for President 2024!
Oh, wait…that’s this timeline, isn’t it? Whoops!
