Explaining The Mandela Effect

A Hypothetical Mechanism for Manipulating Reality with the LHC!

A number of prominent bloggers have been discussing the Mandela Effect this week. The Mandela Effect was named by paranormal research Fiona Broome, who reported vivid memories of Nelson Mandela dying in jail in the 1980s. (History records Mandela as dying in 2013 after serving as President of South Africa.) According to Broome’s report, thousands of other people share her memory of Mandela’s early death. Broome argued this was evidence of parallel realities.

Since then, the Mandela Effect has become an internet phenomenon. The list of alleged Mandela Effects is large and many of them are quite surprising. Here’s some that have personally confounded me:

• Memories of reading the Berenstein Bears. The actual name is Berenstain Bears.

• Memories of seeing the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia spilling a bunch of fruit. The actual logo is simply a bunch of fruit.

• Memories of watching the movie Moonraker, where Jaws falls in love with Dolly because she has braces. But Dolly in the actual movie does not have braces. (This one really gets me because I remember watching it while I had braces and enjoying the scene for that reason! Even the BBC agrees she had braces!)

Most recently, several bloggers in the Christian blogosphere has raised concerns about whether the Mandela Effect might bring about changes in the Bible.

Now, before we proceed, let’s clarify where matters stand. According to mainstream science, the Mandela Effect isn’t real. It’s simply the result of false memories:

Scientists suggest that these [Mandela Effects] are examples of false memories shaped by similar cognitive factors affecting multiple people and families, such as social and cognitive reinforcement of incorrect memories or false news reports and misleading photographs that influence the formation of memories based on them.

Got it? Neanderthals were just like us, magic is just not real, there are no UFOs, and the Mandela Effect is just mass confabulation.

According to internet conspiracy theorists, however, the Mandela Effect is not just a real phenomenon — it’s a weapon. These theorists claim that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is used to manipulate our reality, causing changes in our universe each time it runs. This claim is widely popular on 4Chang’s /x/ and /pol/ boards, but it has also shown up on a number of other sites.

What these conspiracy mavens have failed to offer, however, is a mechanism by which the Large Hadron Collider could possibly change reality. On its face, it sounds absurd. How could a big particle collider change the universe?

Let’s Get Colliding Largely

Theorists have nowadays accepted the possibility that energy emissions from Large Hadron Collider at CERN could generate quantum micro-black holes (see Alberghi, Casadio, and Tronconi 2007).

It is possible that these micro-black holes would emit tachyons (see Srivastava 1983).

As tachyons are faster-than-light particles, their worldlines are spacelike rather than timelike. If one assumes that tachyons have an invariant direction of travel, it follows that in certain frames of reference, tachyons travel backwards in time (see Arntzenius 1990).

Therefore, during its operational run in December 2012, LHC might have generated unobserved micro-black holes from which tachyons escaped and traveled backward into the past.

As these tachyons decayed, they could release energy which could interact with other particles in past. Such interactions, though microscopic, could cause “butterfly effects” (see Lorenz 1963) that materialized as retrocausal macroscopic changes in those worldlines associated with the interactions.

Voila. Each time the LHC runs, it changes the worldline. Reality shifts.

Well, Why Hasn’t the Universe Gotten Destroyed?

The possibility that the LHC might change reality every time it runs raises the question of why it hasn’t changed reality destructively. Why hasn’t the universe been blown up?

The answer to this is, of course, “Look around! Maybe you haven’t been paying attention to current events, but we’re getting our asses kicked, pal.”

I jest. The real answer is that changes to the worldline are limited by the Echverria, Klinkhammer, and Thorne (EKT) Effect. The EKT Effect proves that retrocausation cannot lead to paradoxes. Any self-contradictory event sequence will be replaced in reality by a closely related but noncontradictory sequence (see Dobyns 2011).

Therefore, the LHC cannot bring about changes which would result in the LHC not being built. Since the LHC is an incredibly large, expensive, and difficult-to-maintain piece of scientific hardware, worldlines in which WWIII destroyed Europe, or an EMP flare destroyed all electronics on Earth, and so on, are impossible. Subject to that constraint, worldlines could shift in a number of ways.

But Why Do We Remember the Changes?

Demonstrating that there is a theoretical mechanism by which the LHC might change reality does not yet explain the Mandela Effect. After all, the point of the Mandela Effect isn’t that the universe used to be different; it’s that we remember the universe being different.

“Fine,” our hypothetical critic admits. “The universe possibly changes. Why do we remember the universe before the changes?”

Answering this query to an analytic philosopher’s scholarly satisfaction would require an esoteric discussion of materialist, idealist, and dualist foundations for conscious memory and metaphysical arguments about whether the past exists ontologically, structurally, or simply epistemologically. For our humble Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, we needn’t get so complex.

Consider: If the Mandela Effect is not real, we currently live in a universe where millions of people share false memories.

But if the Mandela Effect is real, we still live in a universe where millions of people share false memories. The only difference is in the status of their memories; if the Mandela Effect is not real, the memories have always been false, but if real, they were once true but are no longer because the worldline in which they were true has been obliterated.

Now let’s expand the range of possibilities. Let’s imagine that among the many worldlines of our universe, there are these four:

• Worldline 1. Nelson Mandela died in 2013, but many people have false memories that he died in the 1980s.

• Worldline 2. Nelson Mandela died in 2013, and nobody has false memories that he died in the 1980s.

• Worldline 3: Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s, but many people have false memories that he died in 2013.

• Worldline 4: Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s, and nobody has false memories that he died in 2013.

Our hypothetical critic would like to claim that if the worldline shifted from Worldline 4 (where Mandela died in the 80s and nobody thought he died in 2013), it would have moved to Worldline 2 (where Mandela died in 2013 and nobody thought he died in the 80s).

But the only instance available to us as an exemplar worldline is Worldline 1. So why would we assume that universes with false memories are less likely than universes without them?

Since we know we’re now in Worldline 1, then isn’t it more likely that prior to the LHC changing the worldline, we lived in Worldline 3 or 4 (where he died in the 80s), and that after the change, we moved into Worldline 1 (where he died in 2013 but many people remember him dying in the 80s)?

And likelihood matters. Our proposed mechanism for changing the worldline is a microscopic interaction between tachyons and other particles in past. Such interactions would be limited by the probabilities of quantum mechanics. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that the many worlds exist in proportion to the likelihood of their particular worldline having occurred. This assertion is necessary to explain the apparent probabilities of quantum mechanics witnessed by observers.

All other things being equal, then, we would expect to see minor, rather than major, changes to the worldline. For instance, if the location of our house changed between Worldline 1 and Worldline 2, we’d expect that we moved to the house down the street, not to a house in another country.

Now, let us suppose that a person’s memory of past events tends to affect the person’s beliefs about future events. This seems to be a plausible supposition, as many of us are guided in our choices by our past experiences.

For instance, let’s imagine that I grew up in Worldline DWB, in which Dolly wears braces in the movie Moonraker. Because I saw Jaws fall in love with Dolly in her braces, I concluded that it was possible I, too, would find true love despite having braces for a 14mm overbite requiring upper and lower retainers.

Let’s further imagine that, had I not believed I would find true love, I would have become a cenobitic monk living a life of chastity and prayer; but because Moonraker made me believe I would find true love, I instead devoted myself to the sigma grindset and became an irresistible sexual dynamo by age 25.

Now let us imagine that in 2012, the Large Hadron Collider sent a tachyon back in time that retrocaused Dolly to lose her braces. At this point, we can imagine two possible worldlines. Let us call them Worldline DNWB and Worldline DFM.

In Worldline DNWB, Dolly never wore braces and no one thinks she ever did. In that worldline, I became a cenobite somewhere in a mountaintop monastery like Meteora.¹ Because of this, I never got my groove on, never founded The Escapist, never wrote my bestselling RPGs, and never started my ever-cheerful blog. The Earth is a darker, sadder place in Worldline DNWB, very different from our present-day utopia.

In Worldline DFM, Dolly never wore braces but I mistakenly thought she did. In that worldline, I still hoped for true love, so I still devoted myself to the sigma grindset and became an irresistible sexual dynamo, and all the rest followed as a matter of course. This worldline is essentially identical to Worldline DWB except that I have a false memory.

It seems clear that Worldline DFM is much closer to Worldline DWB, and therefore a much more probable outcome than Worldline DNWB given a starting point of DWB. And, thus, it would not be surprising that, if I started in DWB, today I live in Worldline DFM.²

Of course, this is not deductive proof that erroneous memories are real Mandela Effects caused by changing worldlines. It is merely an abductive inference, a possible explanation. Whether it is an inference to the best explanation, or a ludicrous conspiracy theory based on unproven scientific theories, I leave to the reader to contemplate on the Tree of Woe.

I am grateful to Dr. Vasiliy Serebryannikov, a particle physicist at the L.L. Vashilev Research Foundation in Akademgorodok, Siberia, for his insight that tachyons could cause the Mandela Effect. For more details on Dr. Serebryannikov’s work, see Ascendant: Rogues Gallery, coming to Kickstarter this winter.

1. Site of the climactic scene in For Your Eyes Only, another excellent James Bond film.

2. I may have slightly exaggerated the extent of my sigmatic dynamism in our worldline.