Is the collider and calendar resemblance just a coincidence?

The dates don’t line up the way that comparison suggests. The Large Hadron Collider began operating in 2008, with its first collisions in 2009. 2012 was when researchers announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Round, detailed designs can look alike without sharing a meaning. A collider is a ring-shaped machine built to send particles around a track. The Maya calendar image is a carved calendar monument. A resemblance by itself doesn’t show that one inspired the other.

The 2012 part gets repeated as if the Maya calendar predicted an ending, but a cycle in the Maya Long Count reached a turning point that year. It wasn’t the end of the calendar. Linking that date to the collider seems more like a striking coincidence than evidence of a connection.