This photo discovered by Shacknews appears to show an unwitting Gordon Freeman standing in the CERN test chamber. Soooo eerie! Let’s hope he was working to prevent any accidents.
If you’re a gamer you’ll get a kick out of these tidbits. CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research) when it was established back in 1954. Since then their research has expanded beyond atomic nucleus, into higher-energy particle physics. The World Wide Web you’re using to visit this blog began as a CERN project in 1989/1991, the same goes for web servers.
But while interesting, enough with the history lesson, let’s compare these two stories to uncover what makes the above picture so eerie.
1. CERN has just started experimenting with the Large Hadron Collider, which is a worldwide scientific cooperation project built in collaboration with over 8,000 physicists from over 85 countries as well as 100’s of universities and laboratories. It’s aimed at discovering the secrets behind how the origins of the Big Bang. Right now they are being sued by the European Court for Human Rights who fear the 27km/17miles long underground Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth by creating a “black hole”!
2. Is any of this starting to sound familiar? In the Half-Life game series, players assume the role of Dr. Gordon Freeman, a recent graduate theoretical physicist who must fight his way out of a secret underground research facility called the Anomalous Materials Lab. The research and experiments being done there into teleportation technology have gone wrong and caused a time-space catastrophe called a “resonance cascade”!