Three weeks after they announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the sun shot out the largest solar flare in more than a century. So maybe they did trigger a doomsday scenario - one that we couldn't see. The scientists at CERN were messing with forces beyond their control - beyond their understanding. What if that cluster was held together by the force of gravity? What if the people decrying the power of the Large Hadron Collider were right to be worried? But the vast majority of those versions would likely be clustered together around the most probable outcomes. The Many Worlds of the Quantum Multiverse | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios In that sense, there would be countless versions of the Earth, the Berenstain Bears, and you. A popular explanation for this is that every possible outcome takes place, but splits off into an endlessly branching multiverse. As familiar as it is mysterious.Īt the quantum level, the mechanics of gravity remain vague, and events are theorized to take place not as a result of ordinary cause and effect but as a function of probabilities. The weakest of the fundamental forces, yet potent enough to puncture the fabric of the universe - creating a black hole from which even light cannot escape. They were hoping to improve our understanding of Gravity. And beneath the border of France and Switzerland, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) were using their enormous and massively powerful particle accelerator to find it. It was thought to mediate the quantum field responsible for providing particles their mass, thus regulating the force of gravity. With that in mind, I developed an alternate explanation for the accelerating weirdness of the world.īack in 2012, the Higgs Boson was still theoretical. But while the particulars of his theory and his evidence may not hold up to scrutiny, there's a kernel of truth in Hinton's vision that's only gotten more compelling in the 16 months since he wrote it. He points to a number of supposed 'Mandela effects' and an anonymous CERN 'whistleblower' on 4Chan as evidence that we have left our familiar reality. But why? What is the origin? It's as if humanity has lost its grip on reality… or reality has lost its grip on us. In short, everything has gotten so f***ing weird. Before Jeff Bezos announced his plans to go to space. Before Elon Musk hosted SNL and he and Grimes named their baby X Æ A-Xii. Before Rudy Giuliani in Borat 2 and Rudy Giuliani at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Before 2021.before the coronavirus pandemic.īefore QAnon candidates. Before Trump made sweet, passionate love to the American flag on live TV.īefore 2018, when school shooting survivors became instant celebrities and then despised by half the country. Things were less weird before 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president. For example, researchers will continue the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance that so far can be observed only by its gravitational effects on the cosmos ( SN: 10/25/16).Īfter several years of operations, the LHC will shut down again to prepare the High-Luminosity LHC ( SN: 6/15/18), which will further boost the rate of proton collisions and allow for even more detailed studies of the fundamental constituents of matter.Things were less weird before 2013, when we got a new pope without the old one dying - resulting in two popes plotting against each other. And researchers will be keeping an eye out for new particles or anything else that clashes with the standard model, the theory of the known particles and their interactions. Physicists will use this data to further characterize the Higgs boson, the particle discovered at the LHC in 2012 that reveals the source of mass for elementary particles ( SN: 7/4/12). Experiments at the LHC will start taking data this summer. And when fully up to speed, the upgraded accelerator will pump out proton collisions more quickly than in previous runs. Likewise, the beams are starting out wimpy, with relatively few protons, but will build to higher intensity. Previously, LHC collisions reached 13 trillion electron volts. Researchers started the accelerator’s proton beams out at relatively low energy, but will ramp up to slam protons together at a planned record-high energy of 13.6 trillion electron volts. The LHC is coming out of hibernation gradually. On April 22, protons once again careened around the 27-kilometer-long ring of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, located at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva. Scientists shut down the particle accelerator in 2018 to allow for upgrades ( SN: 12/3/18). After a hiatus of more than three years, the Large Hadron Collider is back.

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