CERN and the Timeline: The Rumour That the LHC Moved the World to Another Version

On the morning of September 10, 2008, a beam of protons completed the 27-kilometer circle of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator beneath the French–Swiss border. Screens in CERN's control room showed two bright points, confirming that the beam had made the full circuit. Nine days later, on September 19, an electrical incident in sector 3–4 released helium into the tunnel and damaged superconducting magnets. The machine stopped for more than a year. To engineers, it was a failure to repair. To the rumour that came later, it was the moment a machine touched something it was not meant to touch: the structure of reality and the timeline.