The mysterious Mandela particle
- Sue Verlander
Few people realise Nelson Mandela had a nuclear particle named after him.
This honor was bestowed by a British University, Leeds, in 1973. Even fewer are aware of the controversy surrounding this. With all the speculation around CERN and the Large Hadron Collider being behind the Mandela Effect, the discovery of an actual particle named after him serves only to fuel the flames even more.
Leeds University 1973
However, things aren't quite as they appear. It seems the particle was theorised to explain an anomaly in some measurements taken by a cosmic ray group at Leeds (Dr. E. W. Kellerman, Dr. G. Brookes and Dr. J. E. F. Baruch) of multi-TeV rays near sea level. They predicted the existence of a particle 40 to 70 times the mass of a proton, a boson which would mediate the weak interaction. This theoretical particle was indeed named The Mandela Particle after Nelson Mandela in 1973.
Problems with this arose later, starting in 1975 when a team from Durham University could not replicate the measurements, and others since have caused the original team to admit the likelihood of a new particle is "not as large as we thought at first".
So the Mandela Particle remains as elusive as ever. Does it exist, or is it a Mandela Effect itself?