LHC Shutdown

 

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.