People Seem To Think CERN Is About To Make Contact With A Parallel Universe

 An article is circulating around the Internet claiming that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hoping to make contact with a "PARALLEL UNIVERSE" within days. 

Perhaps understandably, people are saying that this really is not the year for it, and, somewhat less understandably, believe that this might be what finally summons Cthulu.

So, in the words of Kent Brockman from The Simpsons, is it time to crack each others' heads open and feast on the gooey bits inside? Well, no.

Like many other viral stories, it's nonsense. It's also five years old, so unless they made contact with a parallel universe and then kept it on the down low, either out of modesty or because it actually was Cthulu, it's fair to conclude that nothing happened.

The experiment was also not about making "contact" with a parallel universe, nor was it talking about a "multiverse" as many people have interpreted it from the headline. 

"Normally, when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualized," Professor Mir Faizal from the University of Waterloo told Phys.org. "This cannot be tested and so it is philosophy and not science."

What could be tested is the existence of extra dimensions, if Faizal's paper in Physics Letters B is correct. It's been proposed many times that the universe could be filled with miniature black holes, perhaps smaller than an atom, but producing them and detecting them is particularly challenging. 

In a four-dimensional universe, you would need 1016 TeV of energy in order to produce the black holes, well beyond the capabilities of the LHC. However, if there are more dimensions – as in the string theory model of the universe that involves 10 dimensions – then theoretically the LHC could produce miniature black holes. Some scientists went further and said it should be producing around one miniature black hole per second.

In 2015, no miniature black holes have been detected. That's where Faizal's paper came in. He and his co-authors believed that the energy required to produce miniature black holes in a 10-dimensional universe had been miscalculated, and could theoretically be produced only once the LHC went over 11.9 TeV. As the LHC powered up and started smashing atoms together at higher and higher energies, it was hoped that the detection of miniature black holes at around this energy would confirm the existence of extra dimensions.

"Just as many parallel sheets of paper, which are two dimensional objects (breath and length) can exist in a third dimension (height), parallel universes can also exist in higher dimensions" Faizal told the Daily Mail. "We predict that gravity can leak into extra dimensions, and if it does, then miniature black holes can be produced at the LHC."

So scientists aren't about to contact parallel universes, and they weren't in 2015 either. But at least it isn't as strange as other articles we've seen about the LHC, including that they do human sacrifices there on the side and that they opened up a massive black hole in the sky, the former of which was actually a prank and the latter a cloud.