We feel fine: CERN scientists did not end the world 12 years ago. This claim is satire.

Was R.E.M. onto something in 1987 when they sang, "It's the end of the world as we know it?"

On June 18, a Threads post shared a screengrab of what appeared to be a miscapitalized news headline that read, "‘Sorry, but we accidentally ended the world in 2012’ Admits CERN scientists." 

The screengrab also included a picture of CERN scientists on a panel and the text of a story that says scientists had admitted to "ending the world as we know it back in 2012, while performing experiments into the Higgs boson particle." 

The Threads post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Threads, Facebook and Instagram.)

The R.E.M. song might be catchy, but in this case it’s not true. The story  the Threads post cites originated on a satire site. 


(Screenshot of Threads post) 

The image in the post is a screenshot of a story published on Waterford Whispers News, a self-described "satirical newspaper." We have previously fact-checked other claims that have originated on this website but been reshared without that context.

The satirical story’s text claims that "several key scientists" at a Switzerland research facility apologized for a "terrible accident that has only come to light now." The accident? That the discovery of the Higgs boson particle "inadvertently shifted the entire planet into an alternate reality," and that "none of us technically exist."

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, aka CERN — derived from the French name "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire" — primarily researches particle physics, which the group’s website describes as "the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them."

CERN is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. In the Large Hadron Collider, two beams of particles travel in opposite directions at nearly light speed and are made to collide.

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In 2012, Large Hadron Collider experiments led the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, named for British physicist Peter Higgs. In the 1960s, Higgs postulated about the existence of a particle that interacted with other particles at the beginning of time to provide them with their mass. In 2013 CERN researchers won a Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery.

But that particle did not shift us into a new reality. 

We have previously fact-checked whether CERN’s activation of its Large Hadron Collider was connected to the April 8 total solar eclipse and rated it False. CERN’s website’s’ frequently asked questions addresses such queries as, "Will CERN open a door to another dimension?" and "Will CERN generate a black hole?"

We rate the claim that CERN scientists admit they "accidentally" ended the world in 2012 False.