A physicist wanted to call out hoaxes online,
and shared a sausage instead of a star.
July 2022 · Twitter
Étienne Klein, a French physicist, philosopher of science and research director at the CEA (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique), posted a photograph on Twitter. He described it as an image of the star Proxima Centauri taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Étienne Klein
@EtienneKlein · July 31, 2022
"Photo of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail... A new world is revealed day after day."
The scientific community's reaction was enthusiastic. People shared, commented, talked about a breakthrough. Proxima Centauri had never looked so... tasty.
A few days later — around August 2–5 — Klein admitted that the photograph was actually a slice of chorizo salami placed on a dark background. He apologised and explained his intent: he wanted to highlight how easily we trust information just because it's shared by an authority. "On social media, fake news is always more successful than real news," he told Le Point.
"Beware of posts that seem to speak for themselves."
— Étienne Klein, the physicist who fed the internet chorizo
Why Chorizo Lab?
Summer 2024 · Prague, Letná
It was summer 2024 and we needed a name for the new company. We met one evening in Letná, at Kolektor, with the plan that we wouldn't leave until we had one. We left without one. Every suggestion was either too corporate, too generic, or already taken by someone else.
After a few drinks we moved on to food at Hillbilly Burgers. The menu had a chorizo burger and we started trying the name on for size.
Then we stopped at Vezmi pivo na klobásu, but they sadly didn't have chorizo. Bio Oko didn't either, but we added a few drinks. Well past midnight we ended up at Koštovna u Počtů, where chorizo was part of the charcuterie board.
By morning the name was clear (well, it wasn't — but we couldn't come up with anything better).