Fact check
CERN, which is the French acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has long been the target of fanciful conspiracy theories. So it should come as no surprise that on July 5, 2022, when scientists at CERN fire up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after three years of upgrades and maintenance work, some conspiracy theorists will be fired up too. For example, one Twitter user speculated that CERN was opening a “gateway” of astrological proportions, obliquely stating that said gate had to do with an early summer sky show featuring a rare planetary alignment. The text of the post is as follows: Get ready everyone for the 5th of July. That’s all I’m saying. Protect your energy. Be ready. Don’t do things that lower your vibration, energy, or focus. CERN will open a gate on July 5th. They started preparing it when the planets aligned on June 24th. It will be Other posts echoed the same sentiment, including a story widely shared on video platform TikTok in which a user claimed the LHC was opening a portal to the future — all while playing the theme song to the Netflix sci-fi series “Stranger Things” ( The plot line has an alternate dimension). On another video platform, YouTube, another user agreed to open a portal. However, in this version, the portal was in 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 indication that CERN opened a portal to the future, hell, or any other dimension outside from the current one, or that a black hole opened, as some have speculated. In a press release, CERN said the LHC’s activities on July 5 were notable not for carrying out the plot of “Stranger Things,” but for “recording high-energy collisions at the unprecedented energy of 13.6 TeV.” CERN is a research facility outside of Geneva, Switzerland, and on its campus is the LHC, which consists of a 17-mile electromagnetic tunnel infrastructure where scientists smash parts of atoms together 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 “a long-sought-after particle that gives mass to all other particles in the universe.” On its current course, scheduled until 2025, researchers hope to answer some of the universe’s big, existential questions, as characterized by the Times: “Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter and not antimatter? What is the ‘dark matter’ flooding the world? How does the Higgs boson itself have mass?’ As exciting as this sounds, the LHC has never been short 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, spread again in 2016, falsely claimed that a video depicted a human sacrifice at the facility. Sources: Goodbye, Dennis. “As the Large Hadron Collider ramps up, physicists’ hopes soar.” The New York Times, 13 June 2022. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/science/cern-hadron-collider-muon-leptoquark.html. “Third run of the Large Hadron Collider successfully launched.” CERN, 5 July 2022,
