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by sillyquiet 2087 days ago
Heh remember the panic about CERN creating mini black holes?

Science reporting is so very bad.

3 comments

I'm not saying the LHC did create a mini black hole and suck the Earth into a parallel pocket universe on a dark dystopian timeline, but... gestures vaguely at everything
I mean, that's a good philosophical premise for a book, I think.

Would we know if we were sucked into an alternate timeline via that kind of science? Would it matter to us? Could we change it?

I'm sure there's a YA novel in there somewhere.

Every single SciFi show uses a shimmering effect when that happens, and I never saw that effect. So, it either happened when I was sleeping or otherwise wasn't looking, or it didn't happen. Or maybe it happened the night I took all of those mushrooms. Never can tell if I'm seeing something or just seeing something.
I'm pretty sure going through a micro black hole involves everything being spaghettified and... waaait a minute, now that you mention it I've been eating a LOT of spaghetti these last few months.
In the good timeline, KitKat had a dash in its name, Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, Pikachu had black on the end of its tail, C3PO didn't have a silver leg, and you could go up in the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
And since then we are all trapped in... the Twilight Zone! (cue spooky music)
And don’t even get me started on Project Z!
It ain't just science reporting.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

Actually, I remember reading at the time that the "We promise it won't create black-holes" narrative came from the PR department of the lab itself to draw attention to their work. It was very successful.