Conspiracy Theorists Are Losing Their Minds About CERN’s Big Shut Down
CERN is today being switched off for its third long shutdown, a process that will take four years. Predictably, many people are seriously freaked out about it.
The thousands of scientists who work there claim this vital maintenance will allow them to unlock more of the universe’s secrets and in doing so answer some of the biggest questions we have about matter, energy, and existence. However, if certain pockets of the internet are to be believed, it will also allow them to pry open portals to other dimensions, merge our timeline with parallel universes, summon demonic entities, and generally cause limitless chaos.
VICE put some of these concerns to Steven Goldfarb, an experimental particle physicist working for the University of Melbourne on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. He told us that, theoretically, it would be possible to create a black hole—but it would only last 0.000000000000000000000000001 of a second. Furthermore, rather than being used as a doorway to let in aliens, werewolves, or doppelgangers (any of whom would need to be quick), any man-made black hole would be aiming to get to the bottom of the gravity conundrum that has plagued scientists for centuries.
For some religious critics and online doom-mongers, the language around CERN has always sounded dangerously close to humans trying to trespass on divine territory. The LHC has been compared to a modern Tower of Babel: a vast, technically brilliant monument built in pursuit of answers that humanity was never meant to have.
Many of the fears surrounding CERN come from interviews given by Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, a Swiss researcher whose claims have become popular in CERN conspiracy circles and within the UFO “truther” community. Across several interviews, she has claimed that physicists told her there are 17 or more dimensions and that beneath the facility is a portal through which “beings” can come and go. One of her most viral claims is that a non-human entity appeared during one CERN experiment and stole a scarf. Perhaps aliens like holiday souvenirs, too?None of her claims have ever been verified, and the CERN staffers we spoke to for this feature denied that she’d ever had any connection with the facility in a professional sense.
Most of the CERN conspiracies, however, relate to what happens when the machine is restarted after an “off” period. The first scheduled maintenance—known as LS1, or Long Shutdown 1—lasted from 2013 until 2015, and in the months following its reboot, Donald Trump announced he would be running for president, a wave of celebrity deaths happened —including Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harambe, and WWE star Chyna—and then of course, there was Brexit. (There was also a spate of “killer clown” incidents.) It felt like suddenly the world had gone mad, and people began questioning if the reason why could be found in the labs beneath Geneva.
The second shutdown, LS2, happened between 2018 and 2021, and saw the machine wake up to a world defined by Covid restrictions, vaccine passports, QR codes, AI panic and a growing sense that everyday life had become more digitized and controlled.
The reasons for the shutdowns are valid. Despite conspiracist claims that they are staged to conceal desperate attempts to hold back legions of malevolent forces who have arrived uninvited from other dimensions—or time travelers from the future aiming to stop present-day scientists from accidentally deleting the universe—technology is evolving at a rapid rate and scientific tools need to be upgraded. “One of the changes we’re making is a bit like moving from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 17—except it’s much more significant than that. It’s not just a simple upgrade. It’s a major leap in what the machine will be able to do,” explained Barney.
When CERN is next brought back online it’ll be 2030, a year already immersed in dystopian lore. Online, the UN’s Agenda 2030 has been recast as a blueprint for a world where we are reliant on digital IDs, live in smart cities, banned from international travel and eating red meat, forced into cashless economies, and left at the mercy of a fascist one-world government.
If that is how things play out, maybe we’ll start wishing that the CERN gang really could fire up the machine and take us somewhere less stressful—whether that’s the past, the future, another dimension entirely, or simply oblivion.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/conspira...shut-down/
CERN is today being switched off for its third long shutdown, a process that will take four years. Predictably, many people are seriously freaked out about it.
The thousands of scientists who work there claim this vital maintenance will allow them to unlock more of the universe’s secrets and in doing so answer some of the biggest questions we have about matter, energy, and existence. However, if certain pockets of the internet are to be believed, it will also allow them to pry open portals to other dimensions, merge our timeline with parallel universes, summon demonic entities, and generally cause limitless chaos.
VICE put some of these concerns to Steven Goldfarb, an experimental particle physicist working for the University of Melbourne on the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. He told us that, theoretically, it would be possible to create a black hole—but it would only last 0.000000000000000000000000001 of a second. Furthermore, rather than being used as a doorway to let in aliens, werewolves, or doppelgangers (any of whom would need to be quick), any man-made black hole would be aiming to get to the bottom of the gravity conundrum that has plagued scientists for centuries.
For some religious critics and online doom-mongers, the language around CERN has always sounded dangerously close to humans trying to trespass on divine territory. The LHC has been compared to a modern Tower of Babel: a vast, technically brilliant monument built in pursuit of answers that humanity was never meant to have.
Many of the fears surrounding CERN come from interviews given by Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger, a Swiss researcher whose claims have become popular in CERN conspiracy circles and within the UFO “truther” community. Across several interviews, she has claimed that physicists told her there are 17 or more dimensions and that beneath the facility is a portal through which “beings” can come and go. One of her most viral claims is that a non-human entity appeared during one CERN experiment and stole a scarf. Perhaps aliens like holiday souvenirs, too?None of her claims have ever been verified, and the CERN staffers we spoke to for this feature denied that she’d ever had any connection with the facility in a professional sense.
Most of the CERN conspiracies, however, relate to what happens when the machine is restarted after an “off” period. The first scheduled maintenance—known as LS1, or Long Shutdown 1—lasted from 2013 until 2015, and in the months following its reboot, Donald Trump announced he would be running for president, a wave of celebrity deaths happened —including Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harambe, and WWE star Chyna—and then of course, there was Brexit. (There was also a spate of “killer clown” incidents.) It felt like suddenly the world had gone mad, and people began questioning if the reason why could be found in the labs beneath Geneva.
The second shutdown, LS2, happened between 2018 and 2021, and saw the machine wake up to a world defined by Covid restrictions, vaccine passports, QR codes, AI panic and a growing sense that everyday life had become more digitized and controlled.
The reasons for the shutdowns are valid. Despite conspiracist claims that they are staged to conceal desperate attempts to hold back legions of malevolent forces who have arrived uninvited from other dimensions—or time travelers from the future aiming to stop present-day scientists from accidentally deleting the universe—technology is evolving at a rapid rate and scientific tools need to be upgraded. “One of the changes we’re making is a bit like moving from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 17—except it’s much more significant than that. It’s not just a simple upgrade. It’s a major leap in what the machine will be able to do,” explained Barney.
When CERN is next brought back online it’ll be 2030, a year already immersed in dystopian lore. Online, the UN’s Agenda 2030 has been recast as a blueprint for a world where we are reliant on digital IDs, live in smart cities, banned from international travel and eating red meat, forced into cashless economies, and left at the mercy of a fascist one-world government.
If that is how things play out, maybe we’ll start wishing that the CERN gang really could fire up the machine and take us somewhere less stressful—whether that’s the past, the future, another dimension entirely, or simply oblivion.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/conspira...shut-down/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
