Hi everyone, @lemouth writing here!
As you all know, @steemstem went to CERN last week. The main purpose of the meetup was not only to have a walk inside the largest and most complex experimental device ever built, the Large Hadron Collider, but also to see the CMS detector from very close.
[image credits: myself (Samsung Galaxy A5)]
There is however another little thing there at CERN, located just next to the ATLAS and CMS main building: a statue of Shiva, one of the main deities of the Hinduism.
Interestingly enough, whilst 20 people registered to the meetup, we were 22 (please check the varied meetup summary posts from the participants).
Moreover, some of us arrived there with a lot of hardons. Weird tools that require a lot of cables to trigger some amazing effects (see here for an example).
As you all know, the return of Satan (Shiva is after all the destroyer) requires a bunch of incantations made by two priests, some hardons and a group of exactly 20 people worshiping the statue lying on the top of the grave of the goddess.
At least according to the Mouthism branch of Hinduism.
I let you connect the dots…
I warned some of you… I am tired and very stressed those days. Therefore, my imagination is sometimes… crazy…
Anyways, more seriously, this 2-meters-tall statue of Shiva at CERN is actually very real. The picture is mine, taken early in the morning on the 9th of February after breakfast. However, it has nothing to do with satanism. I know this contradicts some information that could be found on the web. But not everything that is available on the web is true.
The truth is very different. This statue is a gift from India that has been unveiled in June 2004 to celebrate the longstanding India-CERN association.
Why Shiva? Well, Shiva, or actually the dancing Shiva represented by this statue, is known as the Nataraja and symbolizes the life force. The belief attached to the statue is that Shiva danced the Universe into existence, motivates it and will eventually terminate the project. Carl Sagan was the one who has drawn this metaphor, linking the cosmic dance of Shiva to the modern study of the cosmic dance of the elementary particles…
Now you got the link. If you don’t believe it, then there is only one thing you should do. Come and check the plaque alongside the statue. What I told you is exactly written on there. Going to CERN is by the way worth the trip, believe me. And not only for the statue (that no-one except me saw this time).