CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire),
has decided to switch off the Large Hadron Collider. On the 29th of last month
it powered down all the particle beams. The reason is to carry out major maintenance
and an upgrade. This is called "LS3- Long Shutdown 3" and the work is
scheduled to take around four years. Parts of the seventeen mile circular
device will be dismantled and engineers will replace older components with new
magnets and cryogenic lines. After the refit the machine will be renamed the
High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, HiLumi LHC. With all its new
capabilities the beams will be narrower and focused more tightly. This will
increase the volume of particle collisions tenfold. Many people are wondering
what effect this will have. Seeing as operations at the LHC have a timeline
that matches perfectly the emergence of the Mandela Effect; presumably, if the
LHC really is the cause of the Mandela Effect, that pattern will continue.
Could it be that until the new collider is started there will be no new Mandela
Effect experiences? It's interesting that examples of the Mandela Effect did
not all appear at the same time. The original one in which people recall Nelson
Mandela dying in jail in the '80's, which gave the phenomenon its name, was
published by Fiona Broome in 2009, just a few months after the LHC started
operations. Since then several hundred others have been collated, but not all
at once. The original ones, Loony Tunes and Berenstain Bears etc, emerged soon
after; but others, Mr Monopoly, Fruit of the Loom and KitKat, came later. I
personally had never heard of the Blue Riband one until I saw this old TV
advert on YouTube about three years ago, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQnRgVipDTA.
The comments section is full of people who remember the product as Blue Ribbon.
I do too and I remember this very advert with its catchy song on TV as a child
in the 1980's. Even though the video is seventeen years old, the comments are
generally much more recent. New ones are popping up all the time. Is this
because the people who experienced them never reported them earlier, or is it
that they just appeared at that time because of something going on in the LHC?
Interesting to note that when Run 2 began in 2015, with the collision power
almost doubled from 7 TeV to 13 TeV, new Mandela reports skyrocketed. One of
the stages of scientific inquiry is prediction; so if CERN is the cause of the
Mandela Effect we should quickly see a decrease in new Mandelas until the
machine is switched back on. It's worth bearing in mind that doing the Long
Shutdown 3 other particle accelerators are continuing their collisions as
normal; Fermilab, KEK, Brookhaven NL etc, are still smashing atoms and some are
even upgrading at the same time as the LHC. Two of them are at CERN, the SPS
and ISOLDE. It's as if there is some kind of global coordination at work so
that in a few years these machines can come back to life and work as one for a
collective enterprise. What kind? Who knows? The next four years will be revealing
and I shall be doing my own study about what happens.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2025/09/cern-portal.html.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2025/09/cern-portal.html.
The 2005 science fiction novel "The Solar Bridge" featured a plot point about Nelson Mandela dying in prison, demonstrating that this specific misconception was already circulating in the public consciousness many years before Broome. Therefore any link the the LHC and the 'Mandela effect' is erroneous. Indeed the Mandela effect coined after that 'false memory' was predated by other examples. Before the internet made "Mandela Effect" a catch-all phrase, these shared misconceptions were primarily discussed as odd coincidences or "glitches" in pop culture. The concept of alternate timelines was heavily explored in early sci-fi television, notably in The Twilight Zone. Collective misremembering's—such as the spelling of The Berenstain Bears or misquoted movie lines—were documented in localized, offline conversations and early online message boards long before they were categorized under one umbrella term.
ReplyDeleteHi Anon. I'm well aware that confabulation, errors in memory, is a real thing. I myself watched a Hammer House of Horror episode in 1980 and then never again until a couple of years ago when I saw in on YouTube. I recalled the basic storyline correctly, but the style and feel of the film was totally different. The problem is that with the Mandela Effect millions of people confabulate the same thing very convergently. Explanations like The Solar Bridge really don't work because that is a very obscure novel, not a bestseller and certainly not a pop cultural phenomenon. The same goes for the advert with Richard Kiel, the James Bond actor. He was in a TV ad in which he meets a young woman with dental braces, hence a supposed explanation for why his character's love interest in Moonraker is falsely remembered with braces. Thing is, that ad was only shown for a short time in one country, Finland, a nation that does not export much of its modern culture. The people who state Mandela's death wrongly, or the girl with dental braces in James Bond state that these are not recovered memories, but ones they have always had. That's my experience with "Loony Toons". They even say that during that scene the cinema audience laughed or went "ahh", finding the scene funny or moving. It is true that some of these conundrums predate Broome. In fact people as long ago as a century or more talked about Mr Monopoly's monocle; but the phenomenon increased massively after Broome published her study.
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