Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-09-16/Concept

Concept

Strange portal opened by CERN researchers brings Wikipedia articles from "other worlds"

Note: I trust you, dear reader, to be able to determine whether or not this is fact or fiction. If you cannot, please see the note at the end.

Social media, broadcast news and academia alike have been buzzing lately with the latest discovery: a group of researchers from CERN, running experiments on the new Super-Large Encabulator Array, discovered a strange phenomenon last Wednesday, colloquilally dubbed the Moony-Bazingers effect. While the SLEA group has yet to publish a paper formally documenting their findings, those who are interested in the technical aspects will be pleased to find that, as of press time, 15 preprints are currently available on arXiv concerning the subject.

While a detailed description of the Moony-Bazingers effect is nearly impossible to give in the space we have here, a broadly summary was given by project lead Adam Shirtless at a press conference yesterday:


Perhaps it is appropriate in a poetic sense, since CERN httpd was the first hypertext server, and www.cern.ch was the first WWW site back in '92; it's also appropriate in a practical sense, since CERN is the only organization in the world currently posessing an encabulator array of this size. Whatever the circumstances that lay behind this discovery, it is ground-breaking and unique.

Currently, experiments are underway to determine the properties and nature of the Moony-Bazingers effect; chief among them is the actual status of the data being received. If taken at face value, the data — which consists of HTTP packets that resolve into a variety of files, including Web sites — seem to originate from wildly different worlds than our own. For example, one configuration of the LEA (dubbed the "High Castle setup") yields a number of websites which claim to be located in the "Pacific States of America". Unfortunately, an even more mysterious phenomenon known as the "NFCC field" prevents these worlds from being explored, even with the most cutting-edge technology that has been tried. While varying turboencabulation frequency has allowed connections to a dizzying array of different "Bazingerzones", as they've been termed, all information that has been gathered from the connection so far has purported to be from Earth — or at least a planet with identical gravity, mass, density, elemental composition, set of constellations and solar system.