CERN opened a “portal” on July 5, 2022.
Fact check
CERN, which is the French acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has long been the subject of fantastic conspiracy theories.
So it should come as no surprise that on July 5, 2022, when CERN scientists fired up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after three years of upgrades and maintenance work, some conspiracy theorists would be fired up, too.
For example, one Twitter user suggested that CERN was opening a “portal” of astrological proportions, implying that this portal was related to an early summer sky show involving a rare planetary alignment.
The text of the post reads:
Be ready for the 5th of July everyone. That’s all I’m saying. Protect your energy. Be careful. Don’t do things that lower your vibration, energy or focus. CERN will open a portal on July 5th. They began preparing it when the planets aligned on June 24. This will be
Other posts echoed the same sentiment, including a widely viewed story on the video platform TikTok in which a user claimed the LHC opened a portal to the future — all while playing the theme song to the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things ( its storyline has an alternate dimension). On another video platform, YouTube, another user agreed that there was a portal opening; but in this version the portal was to hell.
While it is true, as noted above, that CERN began operating the LHC after an extended period of downtime for upgrades and maintenance, there is no evidence that CERN has opened a portal to the future, to hell, or to another dimension other than the present, or that it opened a black hole, as some claim.
In a news release, CERN said the LHC’s activities were notable on July 5 not for making the plot of “Stranger Things” a reality, but for “recording high-energy collisions at the unprecedented energy of 13.6 TeV.”
CERN is a research facility outside of Geneva, Switzerland, and its campus is home to the LHC, which consists of 17 miles of electromagnetic tunnel infrastructure where scientists knock bits of atoms into each other in an attempt to make discoveries about the properties of the universe. In 2012, CERN researchers identified the Higgs boson, described by The New York Times as “the long-sought-after particle that gives mass to all other particles in the universe.”
In its current run, scheduled to run until 2025, researchers hope to answer some of the universe’s big, existential questions, characterized by the Times: “Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter and not antimatter? What is the “dark matter” that fills the cosmos? How does the Higgs boson itself have mass?’
As fascinating as this sounds, the LHC has never had a shortage of attention from conspiracy theorists. For example, in 2016 some internet users appropriated a photographer’s image of a storm over Switzerland to falsely claim that CERN had opened a portal to another dimension. Another rumor, again in 2016, falsely claimed that a video depicted a human victim at the facility.
sources:
Bye Dennis. “As Large Hadron Collider Spins Up, Physicists’ Hopes Rise.” The New York Times, 13 June 2022. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/science/cern-hadron -collider-muon-leptoquark.html.
“Third cycle of the Large Hadron Collider successfully launched.” CERN, 5 July 2022,
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