The DUNE Project

Hey True Weirdos, at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. Dan Muckles was one sturdy but very lost pioneer that day in May 1875. Muckles was no miner, but like so many others, he dreamed of making his fortune in gold. Not in California, but in the Dakotas. It had been rumored for decades that the Black Hills were rich in gold.

But that hot day, weary and thirsty, Muckles was just grateful to stumble across a stream. He knelt beside it, scooping water into his mouth. That's when he saw it. Could it be? Or was it just a trick of the light? Muckles scrambled to get to his pack, pulled out his pan, and waded into the stream. He scooped and swirled, scooped and swirled, washing away sand and rocks and water.

He repeated the motion again and again. And there it was, gleaming in the bright spring daylight. Gold! There was gold in them bar hills. Enough gold to sustain 125 years of mining. More than $70 billion worth of gold, as it turned out. It was gold that put the town of Lead, South Dakota, on the map. Today, something else is happening in the ground beneath Lead.

It's called the Doom Project. And if it's successful, we might just find the answer to everything. And by everything, I mean, like, the whole universe. As in, how stars and planets and you came to exist. Because there's something peculiar about our universe. You might say, the math ain't mathing. So, could it really be that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is just waiting to be discovered far below the surface?

Deep underground in the black hills of South Dakota? And they got a small beam of light against them. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Upon hearing this, Father DeSmet begged the Sioux to keep it their secret. He warned the people that if the white man knew about the gold, they'd kill every single Indian living on the plains just to get to it.

Father DeSmet was a Jesuit who devoted his life to missionary work among the native peoples of North America and Canada. Born in Belgium, DeSmet came to the United States in 1821 and before his long career was over, he'd become a U.S. citizen. He traveled close to 200,000 miles of wild territory and he earned the affection and respect of many of the indigenous people he was so determined to baptize as Christians.

The Sioux Nation called him Friend of Sitting Bull for the part he played in persuading the great chief to send a delegation to negotiate with the U.S. government. That resulted in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which is a huge story all by itself. But for our story of Black Hills Gold, the big takeaway was this. The Treaty of Fort Laramie established the Great Sioux Reservation.

This included ownership of the Black Hills and set aside additional lands as unceded Indian territory. Those lands were in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Unceded was a fancy way of saying that the tribes had not legally granted those lands to the government, which meant those lands were off limits to white settlers and prospectors.

In 1874, General George Armstrong Custer led an enormous expedition into the Black Hills. There were 110 wagons, 1900 mules and horses, and more than a thousand men under Custer's command. They found evidence of gold and sent the news back home via telegraph. Sparking another gold rush frenzy. This led to howling frustration for the hordes of would-be gold miners just itching to get into the Black Hills.

But they couldn't, because the land belonged to the Native people. By 1875, when the U.S. government finally got serious about negotiating with the Sioux Nation to take ownership of the land we call South Dakota, the settlers were tired and impatient. From the Yankton Press in Union and Dakotaian, a newspaper desperately in need of a catchier name.

For ten long weary years have the people waited impatiently for the government to be set in this matter and open the door to the vast and unlimited treasures there stored away in nature's vaults. Prayers and petitions have gone forward from the people and their legislatures year after year without avail. While each year has the evidence of glittering wealth in the Black Hills been augmented and confirmed, long and loyally has Dakota waited.

The opening of the Black Hills to settlement adds to Dakota's resources more than any of us have imagined. They wanted to get at the fabled gold, but there were other things they wanted too. The opening of the Black Hills will be the crowning event of Dakota history. It places the feeble territory at once upon the highway to statehood and ensures all the advantages and benefits which that political condition implies.

Now, here's how recent all of this history is. You know the actress Betty White? We all loved her. Her father was born just ten years after South Dakota became a state. But here's another example. Adolf Hitler was an eight-month-old bouncing baby boy the day South Dakota was admitted to the Union. In historical terms, all of this happened just about a minute ago, which makes what's happening now in Lead, South Dakota even more mind-blowing.

But in order to understand how this small mining community found itself chosen to sort out the entire mystery of existence, we first have to see the incredible rivers of gold that ran through the place. Because Lead, South Dakota, became home to the largest and deepest and most productive gold mine in the whole western hemisphere of planet Earth.

It was called the Homestake Mine. At 8,000 feet underground, they called it the greatest gold mine in the world. It was a pair of brothers, Moses and Fred Manuel, who gave the mine its name. The Manuel brothers were born in Quebec and made their fortune mining in Alaska. It's said that they got tired of being cold, and so they headed for the Black Hills.

And it should tell you everything you need to know about Alaskan winters, that a couple of Canadians couldn't hack that and headed for the balmier weather in South Dakota. The Manuel's staked their Black Hills claim in 1876, never dreaming that one of the wealthiest mining experts in the world would come calling. That expert was George Hurst, father of William Randolph Hurst.

George had struck it rich in the silver mines in what would soon become the state of Nevada. Then, he scored another fortune in a silver mine in Park City, Utah. Along with his partners, George Hurst bought the Homestake Mine from the Manuel brothers in 1877. They got rich, and George got their mine and control over the town of Lead, which was now on land that belonged to America, not the Sioux Nation.

Hurst bought up claim after claim, consolidating his power. He and his partners built a narrow-gauge railroad to transport the timbers needed to construct the enormous underground mine, which just kept getting wider and deeper the more gold they dragged to the surface. It only took George Hurst two years to get the whole enterprise up and running, and then he left the Black Hills of California and never returned.

Hurst managed the Homestake Mine from afar until his death in 1891. That's when his widow, the very much younger Phoebe Hurst, took over, with the help of a cousin named Ed Clark. Lead was a wild and sometimes lawless place in those days. Like its more famous neighbor, the legendary town of Deadwood. But Phoebe Hurst had a heart for the place and made multiple visits.

She founded the Hurst Mercantile Company there, a department store that gave unlimited credit to employees of the Homestake Mine. Payments were taken directly from their paychecks. She gave the town a library and a kindergarten and a rec center. She made sure the residents had medical care. And lead grew right along with the mine.

As the pit became larger and larger, the buildings surrounding it had to be demolished. Phoebe Hurst made sure that every single move was paid for, at least in part, by the company and not by the residents. And as that pit grew, the number of mills, they called them stamps, multiplied too. The stamps were thunderously loud.

By 1890, there were more than a thousand of them. It was a deafening roar all day long. At its peak, more than 2,000 people labored in the Homestake Mine. And it was hard, hard labor. Temperatures at the lowest depth exceeded 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Miners were killed by falls and by falling rocks. The teams of horses and mules used at those depths were stabled underground and never saw daylight, which sounds horribly cruel.

But the miners had learned from bitter experience that bringing these animals to the surface frequently caused them to go blind from the sudden change in light. It was filthy, dangerous work. But it was steady work. It was a business that supported generations of people in the Black Hills. It had provided some of the highest-paying and most secure jobs in the entire region.

Workers at Homestake had benefits that hadn't even been invented yet, like an early version of workers' comp. The mine had been good to South Dakota, too. For just one example, during the Great Depression, the mine agreed to pay a special tax that added up to half the state's revenue during those leanest and hardest times.

And let's be real, the mine had made the Hearst family wealthier than they had ever dreamed and made plenty of other investors in the company rich, too. Fast forward to the 1990s, when the depth of the mine hit 8,000 feet. By that point, there was a network of tunnels in the mine that stretched more than 370 miles. In early 2001, a Canadian company called Barrett Gold acquired the mine.

It was a sorrowful day later that year, on December 31st, 2001, when the Homestake mine closed forever. Roughly 10% of all the gold ever mined in the United States had come from that one pit in the Black Hills. It was a way of life for more than a century in the town of Lead. And now it was over. In 2003, with the mine closed, they turned off the water pumps.

Caverns were flooded, equipment still underground was damaged, and so were other facilities located far beneath the surface. The mine fell into disrepair, and there were legitimate concerns about contamination and pollution. Something had to be done. But what? Oh, I know, said the owners, Barrett Gold. Here, state of South Dakota, it's all yours.

You can turn it into an underground research facility to study the secrets of the universe. Okay, believe it or not, this is not nearly as crazy an idea as it sounds. Because back in 1965, the Homestake mine had excavated a special cavern just for a chemist named Roy Davis. Roy filled a 100,000-gallon tank with a chemical used by dry cleaners called perchloroethylene.

Then he embarked on a hunt for neutrinos, an experiment that ultimately landed him a share of the Nobel Prize in 2002. But only after he'd been disrespected and mocked by his fellow scientists for about 30 years. But hold on just a second. How did we get from gold mining to dry cleaning chemicals, and what in the world is a neutrino?

Great questions. And here is where it starts getting weird. The only billionaire in South Dakota stepped up to help the state fund this underground research facility to study the secrets of the universe. His name was T. Denny Sanford, and he coughed up $70 million to create what is now called the Sanford Lab. The state of South Dakota kicked in $40 million to get the water out of the mine and restore the buildings.

Five years later, after the National Science Foundation politely declined to get involved in funding, the U.S. Department of Energy stepped in to finance the operation of the facility. It ended up being a really good job opportunity for former miners in the area who all came aboard to help with everything from draining the flooded caverns and tunnels to mapping the new underground labs and facilities.

And because the Sanford Lab ultimately used only a fraction of the giant homestead mine, that meant about 12 miles worth of tunnels total. So, what the heck are they doing now far below the surface in South Dakota's Black Hills? Like chemist Roy Davis, they're looking for neutrinos. What's that? Well, neutrinos are the most abundant particle in the universe.

They're tiny, blitzing through our universe at about the speed of light. They hardly ever interact with anything, and they zip through everything as if it wasn't there. Everything, including you. Look at your hand. Now, blink. In the time it took you to blink, as many as 100 billion or more neutrinos passed through just one fingernail in that span of time.

You didn't feel a thing, and you weren't harmed a bit because neutrinos don't emit radiation or make any impact on whatever it is they pass through. Neutrinos were born during the Big Bang, and they're everywhere. They're in the sun, and they're in your dog. They're in the Earth's core, and they're in your lunch, and they just might be the invisible architecture of the whole universe.

And speaking of the universe, we can only detect maybe 4% of it. The other 96%, that's made up of what they call dark matter and dark energy. This is not only really hard to understand, for me, at least, with my exhausted little monkey brain, but it's also the stuff the willies are made of. What do you mean we can only detect 4% of the universe?

That's terrifying to even consider, much less try to comprehend. Are we in a simulation? Is this all a dream? Should I have tried harder at math? Welcome to the exciting and bewildering and trippy world of particle physics. Particle physics is the branch of science that studies particles, and particles are the extremely tiny, itsy-bitsy things that make up the world around us.

Particles make matter. That's you and the chair you're sitting on and the device you're using to listen to this podcast and everything else. Everything in the whole universe is made up of particles. But check this out. These particles don't share the properties of the materials they create. Plus, and this is truly mind-bending, these particles are in constant motion.

And wait for it, there's absolutely nothing in the spaces between these teeny tiny particles. Okay, stay with me. For every type of matter particle that exists, there is a corresponding antiparticle, antimatter. We could get lost in the weeds of protons and electrons and quarks and the four fundamental forces. Gravity is one of those.

But we're here for the same reason the Dune Project set up shop in an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota. We're here for neutrinos, a particle so weirdly mysterious that they call it the ghost particle. Neutrinos challenge everything we think we know about everything. Reality itself. For starters, neutrinos have almost no mass.

They're the lightest of all the subatomic particles. They're also the most common and most abundant particle in the universe. And they weren't even discovered until 1956 in an experiment called Project Poltergeist. Neutrinos are insanely hard to study. They barely interact with anything and they aren't even all the same.

They come in three types or what science adorably calls flavors. And get this, neutrinos oscillate or change, which means they can change flavors. Electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, tau neutrinos. It's theorized there might even be a fourth flavor, a sterile neutrino that barely interacts with anything. But the million-dollar question is this.

Since every particle has an antiparticle, how does anything exist at all? Matter should be canceled out by antimatter, annihilated in a spectacular release of energy. So why is there less antimatter than matter? And is the answer to be found in the mysterious ghost particle that is the neutrino? Where do neutrinos come from?

The sun, the explosion of stars, nuclear power plants and particle accelerators. Particle accelerator is a machine whose workings are so far beyond most of us, but it's the machine operating at CERN in Switzerland. There are many conspiracy theories involving that particle accelerator and all the ways that reality seems to be glitching ever since the day that machine was first turned on.

It's called the Large Hadron Collider, and depending which corner of the Internet you ask, it's responsible for opening portals into other dimensions, causing earthquakes, opening a literal gateway to hell, sabotage by time travelers trying to save us from ourselves. And we have our very own particle accelerator right here in the United States at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

And it's a very big part of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, aka the DUNE Project, taking place in the former home state gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. Remember Raymond Davis, the chemist dude with the vat of dry-cleaning chemicals? He was the first scientist to go underground in the Black Hills. His goal? Collect and count the neutrinos emitted by nuclear fusion occurring in the sun.

This is why scientific geniuses are not like the rest of us. How many people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go deep beneath the earth with some dry-cleaning chemicals and catch some infinitesimally small particles being launched out of the sun? Look, I barely even understand that sentence, and I wrote it. Anyhow, the number of solar neutrinos Davis caught didn't make sense.

There were too few, only about a third of what was predicted. And this was bad news for what's now called the standard model of particle physics, because it didn't fit. And if it didn't fit, either the experiment was wrong or everything we think we know about the particles that make up the universe is wrong. This discrepancy wasn't solved for decades, which is why it took so long for Raymond Davis to get any respect.

But it was resolved because now we know that neutrinos can change flavors. Look at it this way. Imagine calling your six kids in for dinner. Four kids show up with a raccoon and a possum. Your first thought is that you're missing two kids. Little do you know that those two kids simply oscillated or changed their identity into those two varmints.

So of course you got the head count wrong, except it isn't wrong at all, just like it wasn't wrong for Raymond Davis back in the 1960s. And this has been a liberal arts major's particle physics analogy. You're welcome. So what are they looking for a mile below the surface in South Dakota? What are they hoping to find?

What are they trying to prove? Let's ask the Stanford Underground Research Facility. When the universe first formed, it had equal parts of matter and antimatter. Somewhere along the line, matter triumphed, and planets, stars, and eventually humans came into existence. Why did matter win? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what are you looking for down there?

They're looking for a majorana particle, a mysterious pheromone that is its own antiparticle. Their search for a rare form of radioactive decay called neutrinoless double beta decay could tell us why matter exists. If they find the answer to this perplexing question, it will require rewriting the standard model of particles and interactions, our basic understanding of the physical world.

Oh my God, my head hurts. What? What? Explain it like I'm about 10 years old. Okay, it could work like this. What if matter and antimatter neutrinos oscillate slightly differently? What if for every gazillion antimatter neutrinos, there is a gazillion and one matter neutrinos? That one extra matter neutrino is enough to create the universe.

See? Kind of, but not really. And how exactly are you planning to do all this a mile underground? Well, the Doom Project has these two massive particle detectors. The biggest is in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The smaller one is at Fermilab in Illinois. The plan is to use the accelerator beam to shoot particles at ridiculously high speeds underground from Illinois to South Dakota.

That's about 800 miles and no tunnel required. The particle beam is aimed at 70,000 tons of liquid argon. And that's how we're hoping to catch and record the neutrinos. And if we can show neutrinos change flavors asymmetrically, well, then we can maybe understand why matter dominated over antimatter during the Big Bang, which explains why we're all here to enjoy tacos and puppies.

Simple, right? Oh, definitely simple, yeah. For a physicist. I know. Maybe a fun little song would help the rest of us understand. We fill it with argon As it's not too expensive As it's great for detecting As neutrinos come through As you knock out electrons As they drift to the anode If you fill it with argon It will scintillate too Detecting neutrinos With a pure liquid argon Just one part per billion Of pollutants inside With electrons that travel Without problems for meters Detecting neutrinos Will be easy as pie Thank you Anastasia and Cheryl and DistroKid for helping out.

Quick question, though. Is there any risk here of opening a black hole or exploding the entire Earth? Asking for 8.2 billion friends who live here. And we have to ask that because, you know, the Internet. There are plenty of people who are excited for what the Dune Project might reveal, who hope to find the answer to why our universe is made up of matter.

Why it exists at all. People who are dying to learn about dark matter. The stuff most of our universe is made of. It's something we can't detect and observe with our current tools. And until we understand dark matter, we can't make any real predictions about how the universe expands. Which might seem like one of those giant who cares kind of questions because one, you can't control or change it.

And two, bills got to get paid. So who has time for this kind of craziness? But but what if what if we're playing with fire deep underground in Switzerland and now South Dakota? What if we're unleashing forces in the name of science that we really don't understand? That's what scares people. And it's what's fueling some wild conspiracy theories.

Could turning on this machine create a black hole? This is the Large Hadron Collider. This question was asked about the particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. According to NASA, cosmic black holes form in space when stars much bigger than the sun collapse on themselves. The result is, quote, gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.

And a gravitational pull so powerful that it can pull in nearby material and, quote, eat it. Here's what the U.S. Department of Energy says. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a particle accelerator speeds up the smallest known particles, such as electrons or protons, to very high energies, which, according to CERN, allows researchers to study what happens and potentially gain insights into fundamental laws of nature.

University at Buffalo physics professor Diane Stojkovic weighed in. Current technologies aren't capable of creating a cosmic black hole. Adding, quote, we need an accelerator as big as the whole universe to do that. So we should either improve our technology drastically or we should build a bigger accelerator, unquote.

The official story is the official story. Then came the very strange events of July 2022. Listen to this from FactNominal, a YouTube channel covering space related news. Officially, the experiment was supposed to learn more about Higgs boson and how particles interact with each other. But rumors have abounded that they were attempting to open a portal to an alternate universe.

So now we are ready to inject in the LHC the LIM-1 elements. Start power group, 1,234. Start power group, 1,235. On the fateful day of the experiment, CERN's control room was flooded with reports from scientists all around the world that something had gone wrong. It said that when the experiment was over, a strange energy had been released that couldn't be explained.

Now this energy has come to be known as the portal incident. For over 14 hours during the experiment, the Earth's crucial geomagnetic field that protects us from the sun's radiation was weakened. Solar wind was able to pass through a massive gap that had been torn open by CERN's experiment, causing a massive fluctuation in the global electrical grid.

And that's a problem because... The Earth's geomagnetic field is crucial to supporting life on Earth as it protects us from solar radiation, cosmic radiation and other space-borne threats. And while the incident was short-lived and the world's electrical grid returned to normal within a few hours, no one could be sure as to what happened during that time.

It's no coincidence that an event like this has never been recorded in the entirety of human history until CERN's experiment. Hmm. That sounds potentially not great. But even stranger and more unsettling and weird beyond weird is this take from a guy named Max Laughlin. He's been described a lot of ways, but my favorite is self-proclaimed Internet genius.

At age 17, he proposed his theory that the particle accelerator at CERN had basically destroyed the universe as we know it, catapulting all of us into an alternate and parallel reality. Actually, not just one. Max suggests that we were seamlessly tossed into an infinite number of parallel universes. In order to agree with Max, you have to embrace the concept of the multiverse.

The multiverse, or many worlds theory, has been floating around since ancient Greece. There isn't what you'd call statistically significant evidence yet to prove that our reality is just one of countless realities, like an infinite number of soap bubbles, all nestled together but sealed off from each other. That's a super simplified explanation, but go with it just for a minute and think about what Max Laughlin is saying.

We all went to bed on July 4th, 2022, in one reality. And thanks to the particle collider experiment at CERN, we entered a new and ever so slightly altered one the very next day. If you do happen to agree with Max, here's something fun to consider. His theory accounts for the Mandela Effect. That's the peculiar phenomenon where we all sort of collectively remember certain facts or events as being one way, only to be told that, no, that's not how it was at all.

The Mandela Effect gets its name from the widespread misbelief that South African president and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s, when his actual death occurred in 2013. Here's an example of the Mandela Effect in action. The movie Shazam, starring comedian and actor Sinbad. Thousands of people claim to remember it, say they remember watching it, even remember going to Blockbuster to rent the video.

But no such movie exists. The cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo. The black detail on Pikachu's tail. The Monopoly board game man and his monocle. Ed McMahon and those giant checks from Publisher's Clearinghouse. The Baron's Steam Bears. Did the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN break the universe in July 2022?

Are we living in an alternate timeline, close enough to be familiar, but different enough to feel strange? To make you feel like you might be going a tiny bit crazy? And when they fire up the new particle accelerator in Illinois and shoot that beam 800 miles underground to that former gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota, what happens?

They're hunting for neutrinos in the Doom Project. What if what they find is, as Max Laughlin believes, a whole new world? The Mandela effect is the effect of... Some people thought that Nelson Mandela died at a certain time. Other people remember it as a different time. And this goes for a lot of other things. You know, Star Wars, classic videos, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, everybody knows that.

Well, if you actually look back to the original film, it's not Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. It's Magic Mirror on the Wall. Which, of course, it's not in the reality I grew up in. Right, exactly. And, I mean, some people in this reality, I guess, maybe didn't make it from our last reality, I'm thinking. I'm still trying to figure out why they don't remember it, and some people do.

But anyway, though, that is the Mandela effect, and we are living in an alternate expansion of our universes. Even in my own scientific notes, I've found rewritten signatures and things that are a little bit different from originally what I wrote. So how did that actually happen? Let's take your notebook, or let's take Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, like an old film, animated film, how did it actually change?

Well, it never changed. We changed. You see, we were moving relative to our universe, and then our universe destroyed, so now the universe moved, well, started to move, or I guess our parallel universes, our multiverse, started to move parallel to us because we were out of alignment, and that just destroyed everything.

So technically, we, I mean, universe didn't change, we did. The multiverse, and memory, and you, that's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser and Don Morgan. Wow. Where to begin? I know it. First of all, it was nice that we had a story that involved a Roman Catholic priest who was a good guy.

Don't hear many of those these days. There's many who are, obviously, but, you know. Father DeSmet, yeah. No, you were waiting for something terrible, weren't you? Something really bad, yeah. Father DeSmet tried to protect the indigenous people from the gold rush, but you know when money's involved, ain't nobody protecting nobody from nothing now.

And I knew that the Hearst family, William Randolph Hearst was involved in publishing. I didn't know where the money came from, so that was something that I learned through all of this. And I didn't know that the Hearst family did all these things with the miners where they'd set up all of these different things that were beneficial to workers because, you know, in most places it's, oh, you got hurt on the job?

Well, sorry, get out of the way. That was Phoebe Hearst, George Hearst's widow, and William Randolph Hearst's mother. She was a pretty remarkable character. Like, we could just have done an episode on Phoebe Hearst for the really forward-thinking innovations that she made and led South Dakota. Most people have heard of Deadwood, and you know about Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, but I don't know very many people that are aware that we're looking for the secret of the universe in the Black Hills.

I just don't know anybody that's aware of that. And it's a lot to comprehend. And let me apologize to all these STEM majors and physicists who probably are not listening to this, but, I mean, for a layperson to try to understand what the hell any of this is was hard. And hopefully I was able to boil it down a little bit.

But what you have to understand is everything is a miracle. Like, as crappy as your day might be, every single thing, including you, is the most unlikely of miracles. And there are big questions here that often come up on this show. Okay, this tiny, infinitesimally hot and small particle explodes, and that's the Big Bang, and now we have the universe, and the universe is expanding.

But what is it expanding into? If the universe is all there is, how is there room for expansion? Who created the tiny particle that exploded and became the Big Bang? And why, in that unimaginably strange and complex moment, why did just enough matter outpace antimatter for any of this to exist? I mean, you want to talk about falling down a bottomless hole of bewilderment.

I mean, think about that. Think about what we're talking about. How is any of it even possible? And the neutrino, you know, people, like you learned about the atom in school, right? If you have the protons and the electrons, they would commensurate with each other, and then there were neutrons. You know, like your parents were probably taught that the atom was the smallest building block of the universe.

Well, not even by a close long shot. Like, I mean, no, the atom can be broken up. And one of the interesting and mind-bending and kind of terrifying things that we're learning from the experiments happening at CERN in Switzerland, and CERN plays a very big part in next week's Multiverse and Mandela Effect Memory episode.

They're showing us that we think we're at the bottom to the smallest, and we can break it up and make it smaller still. So it's almost as though it's universes all the way down. Like, we can't get to the root fundamental particle that accounts for this, which is why they're looking at the neutrino. But the neutrino is weird as hell.

Not only does it have virtually no mass, and it leaves no impact, and it has no effect on you, but it just can change itself, you know, randomly. Oh, I'm a Muon, now I'm a Tau. Like, it just, it's mind-boggling. It's almost as though, let's go with the divine creator hypothesis. It's almost, or game master hypothesis.

It's almost as though the creator, the game master, the game maker, is having a really good time watching us struggle for the answer, knowing that no matter how many levels we move, we'll never, ever get there. That's the challenge of it. And it gives you the willies. It gives me the willies. Tell me that doesn't give you the willies.

It does. My brother is a genius. He really is. And when it comes to things like physics and talking about things like neutrinos, he can sit and talk about it for hours. In fact, he'll casually have a conversation, you know, you'll be talking about something, he goes, well, you do realize that all of this is an illusion that we're in now.

He'll say something like that, and I'll be like, oh, God. And then he'll explain why it is, and I'm like, oh, no, my head hurts. But one thing that I was thinking about with this, so we have those things that are the Mandela effect, right? Those things that seem to be a shared memory that we all have, the way you pronounce a certain word, the way something looks, all of those things.

But I'm wondering if you have had a personal experience or a memory that you're sure is true. That house was light blue that we grew up in. And then you end up seeing that the house you grew up in was light green. And you go, how did I get that wrong? Well, not everybody has the experience of living in that house. So they don't know.

But you're sure of that. Is it possible that this is why memories are so fallible in general with people? As you will see in next week's episode, individual, yes, human memory is a fascinating thing. It's not merely what we think it is. It's certainly not flawless. It's very fallible. It's constantly shifting. And it's why eyewitness testimony is really not what you think it is in a court of law.

The problem with the Mandela effect is that it's not you misremembering the color of the house you grew up in. It's thousands and thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people sharing the same misremembering. And there was actually, and it's in next week's episode, there is a fascinating experiment that was done to try to get to the bottom of this Mandela effect problem.

Because thousands of people across geography, age, gender, demographics, culture, have this same mismemory, mistaken memory. And when these people were studied, it turned out that the things they correctly remembered, they all correctly remembered. And the mistakes in memory were all the same. Which is fascinating. And I can't wait for you to hear next week's episode on memory and the Mandela effect and the multiverse and what role these particle experiments may or may not be playing in it based on which conspiracy theory you enjoy the most.

Can I give a little behind the scenes? So when we do this, when we record this, obviously I go back and I edit any mistakes that we make. Sherry, without any problem, was able to pronounce the word, that thing that's in cleaning fluid. You did it and went through it. I didn't have to make an edit or anything. She went right through it.

I always read anything that's like voices when we go through this. I always do as a placeholder until I actually produce the episode and put the words in. She's got me reading all this stuff, this heavy-duty physics stuff. I haven't pre-read it. I was all over the place with it. I think I didn't get enough oxygen into the part of my brain that deals with math or something because I really, really struggle with math.

But if you can put it into words, I can grasp it the way your dog understands the difference between a car and a chew toy. Dog knows those are two different things, right? That's my grasp of some of these physics and math concepts that we talk about. Damn, it's fascinating. More than anything, when I listen to you talk about this, I see this as a spiritual venture.

I see this as some sort of deliberate architecture, and I am fascinated by that. It does not seem random to me. It seems like a definite, deliberate architecture when you start explaining some of this stuff. There is something profound, and a lot of people that are considered kooks have proposed some of these ideas. We have images from the James Webb Deep Space Telescope.

This show should be brought to you, I swear to God, by NASA and the James Webb Deep Space Telescope. But we have some images out there where we're looking at far, impossibly distant structures in space that resemble the central nervous system of the human body, the iris of the human eye. It's easy to say, well, that's intentional.

Look, we are living in a game within a game within a game in the imagination of some divine creator. You can make all those arguments, and they're really fun to do and really fun to listen to and read. But yeah, there might be something to it that we are, our universe and ourselves, we are constructed along the same principles, and we are the most infinitesimal version of the most impossibly large universe.

Who knows? That's the thing about physics, like, oh my God, to have been smarter and better at math. Because physics is the study of everything. I mean, it's the study of reality. It's the study of the natural world. It's the study of how things happen and why they happen and the root causes of it all. And yeah, you maybe never answer a lot of these fundamental questions, but I want you to think about how far we've come.

So back in 1965, when the chemist Ray Davis was fooling around in the home state gold mine, they were like, what this kooky dude, this kooky scientist with his percoethylene, you know, striking chemicals. But he landed on something really significant in his search for solar neutrinos. And it did take 30 years for science to catch up to that discovery and for him to be vindicated.

So oftentimes, the people who sound completely insane or like they're just wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, are glimpsing something that's so far down the road that we can't quite conceive it yet. And why does any of this matter? You're still going to have to pay your bills. The dog still has to go out. You know, we're still dealing with our big and small triumphs and challenges and heartbreaks.

So why does any of this matter? Well, because humans are, for whatever reason, we're just the most curious creatures. And there's something really profound and beautiful and transcendent, I think, about a little creature gazing up at the sky and demanding to know, how does it all work? Where does it all lead? Where did it all begin?

That's important for us as a species, even if we never answer those questions. It speaks to what we are, which I think, to your point about spirituality, we're more than meat. There's something more to us than that. And will we ever have the answers to any of these things? I mean, I don't know. My poor brain, I can't do long division.

But I do know this. The Mandela Effect is real. It was studied by one scientist out of the University of Chicago, partnered with another out of Dartmouth University. And when I first told Max about this experiment, he was, I mean, he was sat down and completely speechless. And for people that don't know, that didn't follow what was going on with apartheid in South Africa, Mandela was in prison.

And he was, I think he was under house arrest for a number of years, many, many, many years, and then was let out of prison, I believe, when he was in his 70s. So there was a period of time when he wasn't, you know, he wasn't on the public stage. That's exactly right. And then was very much thrust onto the public stage.

I remember thinking to myself, well, this guy's gotten to this point in his life and he's working harder probably than he ever has. And his story, of course, is fascinating. There's a great movie called Another Earth. Do you remember that movie? It's got Britt Marling in it. I love that movie, Britt Marling, yeah. If any of this fascinates you, watch that movie.

It was released. It was not a big movie, but I'm sure that it's available on some streaming service or somewhere that you can get. The thing about this is, I don't understand a lot of physics. And with a lot of this, as it's going by, I go, okay, I do sort of understand that and I do sort of understand that. And the parts that I do understand, I'm so fascinated by.

And I think the thing is, we go through our lives not fascinated enough, but too weighted down by, I didn't get this and so-and-so screwed me over and all of that sort of stuff. That weighs us down and prevents us. As long as I have those thoughts in my head, I can't have the fascinating thoughts. And that's what this does to me.

It sort of fires up my imagination a little. Because it's okay to wonder and dream and ask questions. You don't have to understand everything. But if you maybe have like a little handful of the bigger picture, you go, oh, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, well, that gives me the willies. That's interesting to think about. And like human memory, I don't think this is in next week's episode, but the science on human memory is changing by the day.

Because now we have different ways to study the brain. Even though we have no clue about consciousness, like we have no idea what the mystery of consciousness is, but we can look at the human brain and we can watch how the brain lights up and engages when offered different stimuli. So something that science now knows about the human memory, Max, is that every time we revisit a memory, it's not like going to the library and checking out a book and opening the book and the words are printed on the page and you cannot alter them.

The book is published. Your reading it doesn't change the fact of the words on the page. Memory doesn't work like that. The human memory is not a vast library where each memory is stored separately as a book. Every time you revisit a memory, you change that memory. And these happen, you know, there are chemical signatures for memory, we know that now, and different memories are stored and activated in different ways in the brain.

But every time you revisit it, you change that memory. So it'd be like you go to the library and you take out a book and every time you turn the page, you rewrite a few sentences and then you put it back on the shelf. And the next time you open that book, it's a different book than it was the time before and it's going to be a different book when you put it back, when you're finished.

Memory is unreliable. Memory is tricky. And depending on how you access a memory, what your emotional state is, will alter the way that memory is re-shelved, right? Which is why eyewitness testimony is not the gold standard that, like maybe you thought it was when watching cop shows on TV. DNA, which is immutable evidence, has dispelled people's memories many times.

They weren't... So they bring into whatever situation whatever their accumulated experience in life is into that situation, which is going to color how they imprint that. And then whatever happens afterwards is also going to color whatever they think that memory is. And I think that when DNA evidence came in, people started going, well, were these people lying?

No, they weren't lying. They really, if you set them up on a lie detector, they wouldn't move the needle at all. They absolutely believed what it was they were saying. But DNA offered this scientific proof that said, uh-uh, can't be that person. Can't be. Yeah. Our memories are... I think we would be better served to think of our memories as poetry less than hard fact.

Our memories are these beautiful stories that we carry with us for the span of our lifetime. But they're not necessarily factual in the strictest sense of the word. And it's why everyone's had this experience. It's why two people can be in the same room at the same time having the same event and recall it completely differently.

Because you bring yourself to every event. And so, of course, that experience is going to be felt and remembered by you in ways that are specific and unique to you. Our memories are beautiful, but they're not flawless, and they're not necessarily reliable. And it depends also on what... So when they do experiments, it's one of the things that they have when they try to clone that's different.

Because you can have all the genetics that are right, but the temperature may be a little bit different. And that would affect... So whatever's happening internally with you, let's just say your temperature's a little bit up that day. That's going to affect how your memories are going to be made. So there's a chemical component to this as well in addition to the experiences that you have.

I mean, if you could just look at it like, wow, we are these unique, beautiful, emotional little things crawling around on the surface of the planet having a hallucination, that would be closer to the truth than we are infallible collectors of data. Because we're not. Because we're not, right? So when I was working on next week's episode about the multiverse and the Mandela effect, I had an absolutely wild experience that had the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

It's in the episode. I won't give it away. But I got to see in real time, I got to see the Mandela effect unfolding in real time and the absolute disbelief and argument and pushback when these people, these individuals, were confronted with the fact that all of their memories were apparently incorrect. It was really fun to watch that happen for real as opposed to something that we all just sort of talk about.

And these particle colliders, physicists and scientists will tell you there is absolutely no way that these experiments can have any effect on our reality. But the truth of it is, and this is in next week's episode, what is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a Big Bang machine in essence. It creates the Big Bang in microscopic form over and over again.

And so people that are inclined toward conspiracy or just like fun, like sci-fi kind of fun, say, well, I mean, a Big Bang is a Big Bang is a Big Bang. And if you do this, how are you not impacting the fabric of reality in this universe? And as far as the idea of the multiverse, the many worlds theory goes, it's there are scientists and physicists who fully credit it.

And again, to bring back the James Webb telescope, we're now seeing things that we haven't been able to see before because we're very limited. You know, we're just little creatures on this rock and our science is in its infancy and our technology is in its infancy. And so we're just now able to see some things that have been there all along, but we didn't have the tools to look.

Now we do. And the universe is behaving in ways that we didn't expect. It's behaving in ways that make more sense in a many worlds universe, a multiple universe model than in the one sole, one and only fundamental expanding universe model that you were taught in school. So there's just a lot of fascinating stuff to think about.

And again, none of it changes your day to day unless these theories are correct and you are not living in the same world you were born in. It doesn't change your day to day, but does it not add some depth and color to your existence just knowing that some of this stuff exists? Doesn't that give you a sense of wonder that makes you feel good about things?

Well, you know, I think so, and you think so, and the people still listening think so because we're all a bunch of weirdos. Well, we are. For the average person who maybe is uncomfortable with the idea that reality is more complex than it appears. And these are people, when you very gently point out that the human eye is less sophisticated than the eye of a dog or a cat, that what we are able to see in terms of the spectrum of light is very limited compared to what other animals walking the same planet with us can see.

You know, they don't want to hear that. They need to see themselves as apex predators, apex of evolution, that the world is exactly as it appears, and then we die, and we go to heaven, and we float around on clouds, and we can eat whatever we want and never gain weight. And that's okay if that's you, right? If that's what you need to do to get through the day, sure, you betcha.

But there's something really provocative about the many worlds theory, and there's something really intriguing about the conspiracy theory. We have to call it that because that's how it's categorized, that something happened when the collider at CERN was first turned on that tipped us into a parallel but very different reality with the Mandela effect being an artifact.

How is it that thousands, tens of thousands of people share the same faulty memory about an event or an object? How is that? How do you account for that? And also, just sit with this for a second, are you telling me that the world does not feel really different in uncomfortable and hard to pinpoint ways than it did when you were 18 or maybe even 15 years ago?

but you also have to factor in that we filter out as a coping mechanism things that are negative so that we don't live with those as much anymore. Do you see what I mean? Oh, yeah. As the, what's too painful to remember we simply choose to forget? Choose to forget, yeah. So I think that, and you might be right about that, I think that comes into play with this as well.

It's fun to think about, like did you ever watch the TV show Fringe starring Joshua Jackson and, oh, oh my God, what is her first name, her last name, and on a tour? So it was a big network TV show back when big network TV shows mattered, which is not very long ago. Now it would be on a streamer and it would only last two seasons because Netflix would give it the heave-ho, but Fringe was set in this world and it was about a brilliant scientist named Walter who had a son and Walter was thought to be barking mad insane, but it turns out he wasn't insane at all and there was a, it was a many worlds theory show and that there was a reality just next to ours that was leaking into our own and vice versa and that when these two realities began touching and interfacing, it caused catastrophic tragedy in both worlds and so a team of FBI investigators headed by Olivia Dunn, played by the incomparable on a tour, are investigating this anomaly, these anomalies in time and space and eventually they figure out how to travel to the parallel world and the show, as the show goes on, we discover something and that is that the very difficult relationship between Walter and his son, played by Joshua Jackson, there's a reason for it and that is because in this world, our world, Walter and his wife lost their son and Walter traveled into the parallel world and brought that boy back into this one to ease their grief and that boy grew up to be the cynical and discombobulated character played by Joshua Jackson.

It's a fantastic television show. If you love, it's a mixture of science fiction and crazy physics and police procedural and all of the actors are extraordinary in it. The actor, the African-American actor Lance, well, he just died, Max. We're just talking about him. We loved him. Lance Reddick. Yeah, he's in that. He has a very important role in that and he's also, as my fellow John Wick fans know, he has an important part in John Wick but he's in that show and it really lets you consider what would it mean to have another version of you just on the other side of the membrane.

So, that's the TV show fringe if you want to watch it on Amazon Prime or whatever. In the physics of the multiverse, one idea is that every decision you make, every action, every consequence, you spin off another world. So, in this world, I married my husband Kevin but had I not made that decision, I would have closed down all of the options that exist for me now and I would have spun off a completely separate world of other options and decisions in a different life.

So, we can think of that as, yeah, well, obviously, right? If you didn't do it, you'd have a different life but in the multi-world theory, you didn't do it and you do have another life. That there's an infinite number of worlds with an infinite number of possibilities and it does give you a big ass headache to imagine.

It's kind of like, do you remember the movie Sliding Doors? Do you remember that? Oh, with Gwyneth Paltrow, yeah, yeah. Yeah, very much. It's about the guy, the guy, I guess he catches his girlfriend fooling around with somebody else. The sliding doors are, if timing had been just a little bit different with a couple of these things, how it would have changed your life which is something that I love to speculate on because shortly before, shortly before I started working with you, that's when I went and took the tour of the BBC and the guy talked about a job.

Well, we've got a job available. And I remember thinking to myself, it was like a, it was a producer. It was something, something that was in my wheelhouse and I remember thinking to myself, no, I'd need permission from someone to do that. You know? Yeah. And I often think to myself, not that I am sad with how things worked out, it's just I often wonder what direction my life would have been taken if I had done that.

I wouldn't have ended up where I did. I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. You wouldn't be here. No, I'd be somewhere but I wouldn't be doing this, certainly. My friend, Uncle Sparkles, had an opportunity to move to London and live a completely different life than the one he lives now. And what kept him here was family.

He just couldn't conceive of being that far away. His parents were older and, you know, he's a devoted son and brother. He just couldn't see himself being an ocean away. But I think a lot of us have those really big points, like crossroads or inflection points, whatever you want to call it, where we were given a choice.

And the choice that we made completely shaped the life that we live. And have we made the other choice a completely different life? So, like in a movie or a TV show like Fringe, you could find a way to visit that other world and to see that other version of you living that other set of choices, which is super interesting to think about.

It is. Although, you know, it doesn't appear to be possible now unless the conspiracy theory, which is super fun, I love it so much, is correct in that we got tipped into an adjacent but different reality. And there are lots of things that you can point to where you go. This is not the America I grew up in. This is not the way things were supposed to be.

This doesn't feel right. This doesn't feel comfortable. I feel out of place and out of step. And there are a lot of people right now, you may not know this, who feel deeply displaced. And they're not insane. This isn't an episode of Batman. They're not in the Arkham Asylum with the Scarecrow, okay? These are people that you pass in the grocery store, at school, at church, at your job, when you're walking the dog.

There are people who feel a profound sense of displacement at the cosmic, spiritual, every imaginable level. And some of these people misremember things in ways that is upsetting. And that's the Mandela Effect. Like we joke about it like, oh, the Monopoly, man. But there are people who feel deeply out of touch with, they don't belong here.

This feels really wrong. And sometimes I look around, like I'm not one of those people, although I have, I suffer from the classic Mandela Effect problems that tens of thousands of my fellow humans do. But I often go, what the hell? What in the hell happened here? How did we get here? This does not feel like home. And what are you gonna do, right?

What are you gonna do about it? Not a damn thing. You're gonna suck it up. You're just gonna suck it up. You're gonna be sucking up some neutrinos. Yeah. And seriously, just look at your hand and blink. Billions of neutrinos passing through your body, leaving no trace. What the what? And are you not bothered, or at least intrigued by the fact that the universe even freaking exists when it technically mathematically should not?

That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Yeah. And how great would it be for the people of South Dakota and the descendants of those gold miners at the Homestake Mine? How wild would it be if that's where we solved the mystery of life, the universe, and everything? I just think that would be awesome. I think it would be appropriate.

So... A little Wild West gold rush, secret of the universe convergence there in the Black Hills. And Black Hills gold is real. It has, like, other elements in it, like copper and stuff, that gives it its unique color. And you can find some high-quality Black Hills gold right now on the Home Shopping Network's website.

Believe me, I love it. Shari, you are talking to somebody who worked as a host on a TV shopper's channel who sold Black Hills gold in items. Did you know when you were selling it that it was a real thing? And not some BS marketing slogan? It was just the next thing... Yeah, Black Hills gold meant nothing to me. It really didn't.

It was just the next thing that was on the rack next to the Capodimonte and, you know, the Patrick Henry decanter. I mean... It's a real thing. It's, like, super awesome and interesting if you're into that kind of stuff. So, yeah. This was an episode to give you a headache. Next week... Next week is an episode to pull the rug out from under you.

And I think that that's always a good thing to have happen. Shari, for all the technical stuff that was in this episode, I do feel like I at least had a general understanding of it and, like I said earlier, a sense of wonder about that. So, I didn't get too bogged down... I didn't get too bogged down with trying to figure it all out.

If I could tell you... Oh, my God. I hope I got even close to correct because it is not... It is not this liberal arts girl's forte to dive into particle freaking physics. But these are the things that make up the world around you. They are. There's nothing including yourself that you can see or touch or feel that isn't built up of these things.

And the fact that nothing is stationary, nothing is static, the can of Diet Coke you're looking at right now is in motion because it's constructed of these particles. There are empty spaces in between them and they're constantly moving. And sometimes I think that the people that are considered completely insane... And there's a really interesting other conspiracy theory about people with severe schizophrenia that they are not mentally ill at all.

They are actually perceiving reality as it is and it's terrifying. Our eyes and our brains curate what we experience as reality. Our eyes are looking at, again, that can of Diet Coke and our brain is filling in all of the necessary details we need to make that shimmering, endlessly moving object into a can of Diet Coke.

Now imagine that you were born with a different brain and instead of your eyes and your brain curating all of the data that's flooding into your senses and giving you a quote-unquote stable reality in which to operate, imagine if your brain showed you what was really happening. You would be unable to function and people would call you insane.

Isn't that interesting to think about? That is. Yeah, yeah. That's why we call it true weird stuff and not soothing bedtime stories. Guess it's good that I'm blissfully unaware then. Let me just say I've never been happier to be blissfully unaware. Remind me, let me make myself a note. Maybe we should do an episode on some of the more fringy, wild theories about certain mental health diagnoses, what we call hallucinatory behavior, psychotic behavior.

Because what is psychosis but a detachment from reality? Right. A detachment from reality as we have collectively agreed to experience it. What if you're not psychotic at all? What if you just don't have the filter that allows you to reconcile this world of endless motion, energy, and particles into something stable and coherent?

Something to think about, kids. Fascinating to think about. Yeah, so if you are a person who would swear up and down that they used to be called the Berenstain Bears and what the hell, what is this Berenstain nonsense? That ain't how it was when you grew up? It was always Berenstain. Berenstain. If you're pretty damn sure that for most of your life the Fruit of the Loom logo had a cornucopia in it...

Then you're going to want to be here for next week's true weird stuff. My Mandela Effect little weirdos. Because you're going to find out that while everyone swears you're wrong, you are far, far from alone. And it might just have something to do with these particle physics experiments that are happening in South Dakota and Switzerland.

And we'll see you on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

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