You would think an organization dealing with something like the higgs boson has professional presentations with sleek and stylish designs. Or they could present a slideshow using Comic-Sans as the font. As proven by this photo, and tweet from the person who looks to have discovered the font use first.

The photo and knowledge of CERN, the organization with some of the most brilliant minds in the world using Comic-Sans, has led to ridicule from not just people on Twitter but other sources as well. The most interesting being this YouTube video, which I have no words to describe. Apparently, God is a hipster in sunglasses.

Here’s some other funny reactions from Twitter users, poking fun at the group of people who could easily wipe us all out.

If I may interject, I think we’re being a little hard on CERN here. These people are trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe, not impress us with their amazing design choices during their presentation. However, you would think an organization which is looking into these mysteries would know Comic-Sans can stir up enough rage to make their LHC look like a pop-gun. They might find solace within the walls of the Comic-Sans Project though.

If you’re a physicist, your ruminations might gravitate towards bigger questions, like why people have mass:

Without mass, the universe would be a very different place. For example, if the electron had no mass, there would be no atoms. Hence there would be no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology and no people. In addition, the Sun shines thanks to a delicate interplay among the fundamental forces of nature, which would be completely upset if some of those force particles did not have large masses.

No mass? No people! Nice!

In fact, the search for why objects have mass was the topic of a presentation today at CERN where the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson. If that sentence intimidates the pants off of you, don’t worry – most of humanity is clutching their britches right along with you. You see, the Higgs boson is a proposed particle that might give other particles mass. I know, that statement screws my mind a bit, as well, because haven’t we laity always been taught that mass is an innate quality of all matter? Not exactly. Physicists suspect that there is an entity – the Higgs boson – that imparts mass to other particles simply by interacting and passing by them.

Okay, just… just stop right there before you give yourself a nosebleed. In order to better understand exactly what the Higgs boson is (or is expected to be), consider this analogy. Suppose, like today at CERN, the Higgs boson is a famous celebrity on whom all admirers and fans cannot wait to arrive:

Imagine you’re at a Hollywood party. The crowd is rather thick, and evenly distributed around the room, chatting. When the big star arrives, the people nearest the door gather around her. As she moves through the party, she attracts the people closest to her, and those she moves away from return to their other conversations. By gathering a fawning cluster of people around her, she’s gained momentum, an indication of mass. She’s harder to slow down than she would be without the crowd. Once she’s stopped, it’s harder to get her going again.

This clustering effect is the Higgs mechanism.

Everybody got that? Okay, good. So, did CERN actually find proof that the Higgs boson exists today? Not exactly. While they have made significant progress in their search for the Higgs boson, no definitive proof has been attained to confirm that the Higgs boson does in fact exist. So the search continues:

The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.

The physicists continue to explain that, if the Higgs boson particle does exist, they could have a very short existence and also decay in many different ways. It is important, they say, to be able to observe the particles the Higgs decays into rather than the Higgs itself. The Higgs boson is not expected to be able to be seen directly so instead researchers are focusing for the effects that the Higgs has on other particles, such as the presence of excessive decay products, as a more reliable detector for the existence of the Higgs boson.

As if realizing the confusing vernacular wound up in that statement, the researchers decided to throw a bone to us rubes and explain that “none of these excesses is any more statistically significant than rolling a die and coming up with two sixes in a row.” So basically, the existence of the Higgs boson is no more guaranteed than being able to confidently predict rolling the same number on a dice twice in a row. Not good odds, really, but so it goes.

(At this point, I want to personally congratulate you, dear reader, for sticking with this article so far.)

The fact that the Higgs boson might exist was enough to excite the physics world today, which was observed on Twitter during CERN’s webcast of the findings. Viewers were encouraged to post questions to the researchers using the #Higgsupdate hashtag, but the trend was continued afterwards for tweeters to follow the aftermath. Reactions ranged from the learned:

To the practical:

To the jocular and wry:

Essentially, though, the entirety of the conclusions presented today at CERN can be succinctly summarized as such:

And by this cozy limerick provided by The Guardian:

A physicist saw an enigma

And called to his mum “Flying pig, ma!”

She said “Flying pigs?

Next thing you’ll see the Higgs!”

He said “Nah, not until it’s five sigma!”

So did anybody else follow the presentation from CERN today? What’d you think, were you disappointed by the findings (if you even understood them at all)? Were you excited? Do you really not care and still just wanna complain about the fact that there’s no flying cars yet? Comment below!

Google’s described the event as "the world’s first online global science competition," and some interesting partners are also involved: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American. 

As for who’s eligible and what’s at stake, a paragraph on the specially created Google Science Fair Channel on YouTube stated, "Students aged 13 – 18 from around the world are invited to enter and compete for awesome once-a-lifetime experiences, scholarships and real-life work opportunities."

Additional information is supposed to be shared during a live event on the YouTube channel tomorrow morning.  There’s also a more traditional Google Science Fair site that should be updated at some point.

We’ll go ahead and wish good luck to all potential Google Science Fair participants.  It sounds like the search company and its partners intend to make this a very rewarding experience.

UPDATE: Courtesy of the Official Google Blog, here are all the details.

The forthcoming startup of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN labs in Switzerland had people joking about the similarity to the events that kicked off the first-person shooter, Half-Life. “Our understanding of the Universe is about to change,” CERN’s LHC site says.

To gamers who populate social media site Reddit, the comparison of LHC to Black Mesa in Half-Life proved irresistible. The game’s protagonist, Gordon Freeman, fights his way through the aftermath of a resonance cascade and a resulting alien invasion when a massive scientific experiment goes horribly wrong.

Some have compared LHC to Black Mesa, though scientists have dismissed the possibility of LHC bringing about the end of the universe (yes, really.) But to ensure the good guys have an edge in case things in Switzerland go completely pancake-shaped (ie, horribly wrong), people on Reddit suggested sending a crowbar, Freeman’s signature weapon, to CERN just in case.

Alexis “Kn0thing” Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and the artist who draws its alien mascot, decided to make this happen. On Reddit all, Ohanian noted he purchased the crowbar/wrecking bar for CERN, with the intent to paint it red as it is in the game.

One commenter at Ohanian’s blog suggested red rubber coating rather than regular paint in response. Another commenter, on the Reddit thread, said in response to a question about sending a training manual that the Half-Life Anthology and Orange Box would suffice.

The time for all of this to come together took roughly a day. There are few forces stronger than an unleashing of geek creativity and humor. Except, of course, for the LHC. And mysterious briefcase-toting men.

Instead of dreamy startups this time around, though, you can bet the companies at the forefront are names you know: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, News Corp., AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et cetera, et cetera. It will be the most innovative and useful entities, however, with dreams and savvy as they nimbly climb up through the pipes, that will outshine the entrenched behemoths.

So long as the behemoths allow that kind of thing. Right now, they’re putting on a bit of a dog and pony show to distract regulators and the public with issues that are important, but that have definite expiration dates. It’s a money thing. It’s about squeezing every cent out of copper wiring and old-world business models while they still can.

So far, so long as they don’t fall to the dark side eventually, so long as they stay a sort of un-corporation, Google is our best ally in the years ahead. Others have more interest in controlling the pipes and the cash flow than they do in preserving the greatness this next digital revolution will bring to us. Worst case scenario: The Internet becomes TV, complete with recycled, simplified, sanitized, zombified content, brought to you by…

The Grid

The Times Online explains the Grid in a way your mother can understand. Cern, the Switzerland-based quantum physicists that brought us the World Wide Web at the end of the last century discovered there wasn’t enough capacity in the whole Internet to compute the complicated math needed to pursue theoretically existent subatomic particles. A standard Internet-connected PC would take centuries to analyze the data.

So they developed the Grid, which is 10,000 times faster than the Internet we know, connected via fiber-optic routing systems worldwide, eleven in the U.S. They’ll turn it on this summer, accessible by the academics at first, and within two years the 55,000 servers currently in place will increase to 200,000 as the aforementioned prospectors stake their claims.

If you’ve heard the geeks at Google or Microsoft talk about the data in the cloud—where all the information you currently store on your PC is moved online—or if you’ve heard Google describe the way its servers are set up to balance one another to make search results faster, they were talking about the same concept.

The Grid’s implementation will mean cheap or cost-free, fluid video telephony, films downloaded faster than you could type the title, and holograms of your grandkids playing in your den. It could also mean computing power strong enough that interactive takes on a whole new meaning.

For governments it will mean more chaos and more misunderstandings about the Tubes. For network providers, media companies, and online powerhouses it means money.

Lots of it.

For you, it means having to describe to your grandkids that television programming and the Internet were once accessed by separate machines, and before that, choices were very limited.

"Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users," explains Times Online science editor, Jonathan Leake, "many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films."

Put another way: The telco/cable-side of the Net Neutrality argument about capacity issues, about incentive to invest, about the network grinding to a halt unless they prioritize, control, and shape traffic, is either moot, specious, deceptive, misdirecting, or intended for the short-term. In the long term, it’s about gradual upgrades, not immediate ones. In the long term, it’s about squeezing every penny they can out of consumers by upgrading to ‘unlimited" in a very gradual and controlled way.

Do you really think it costs them anything to send an SMS message from mobile to mobile? While you’re thinking of ways to break your teenager’s texting thumbs without getting blamed, consider that Docomo just wirelessly sent 250 Mbps (5 times Verizon’s best fiber offering) on an existing network, much more on the next generation.

It could be a while before we really see the true capabilities of the Grid, if ever, in the States, so long as long-term upgrade strategies remain in effect. There’s no money in giving you everything at once.

The Stakes Are Huge

Google’s stated mission, and the reason the company has been such a powerful (and to some frightening) force, is to index the world’s information. The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, is on that mission as well, a mission that will take, by 20th Century technology, 300 years, as CEO Eric Schmidt famously quipped. The Grid could make that indexing time noticeably shorter.

A couple of years ago, Google mysteriously bought up tons of dark fiber across the country, which they’ve never directly commented on, and have been busy setting up massive data centers everywhere. They work with NASA; they dabble in mobile; and they take noisy stances against telecommunications giants by rallying up support for open initiatives.

Google knows something, and that something is that if telecoms and cable companies are permitted to run closed networks and manipulate the Grid, then Google loses, too. Though Google’s motives are probably more self-centered and survival-based than utopian, the company represents a sort of white knight for the end-user. What’s bad for the information/advertising business is bad for us as well. They’ll have the ability and the incentive to keep the next incarnation of the Internet open, just as it has been. The same way steel and oil and medicine were manipulated last century to create an impression of scarcity is the same way some companies are looking to manipulate the next great cash cow in this century. Fortunately, a behemoth like Google has opposite (monetary) interests, and represents our best hope.

Governments will have little incentive to help out. They need cooperation from the network providers to police the unprecedented amount of information flowing across their networks. Nothing like a little legal immunity to make sure backs keep getting scratched. While the DOJ acts like they’re within their rights to snoop, the FCC does a dance around the country to give an appearance of concern about Comcast and their traffic-shaping policies.

But so far it’s just lip service.

They’re not alone. All the giants are jockeying for position on this. The RIAA and MPAA have a definite stake and powerful, multitudinous lobbyists. If they think piracy’s a problem now, just wait until movies and music are whipping across the Internet as instant as a text message. A neutral Internet, where ISPs aren’t able to snoop into and manipulate packets, is bad for their business, too.

And television? AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, all want to provide that on their networks, alongside telephony services, and any number of others possible. For fifty years in television there was a huge cost barrier at the platform level and at the production level. That allowed messages and content to be better controlled and monetized. All that control allows for tiered networks similar to cable TV, similar to mobile phone plans that force consumers into bundles of services and extra expense for every, well, extra. 

An open, hyper-fast Net makes that business model obsolete and scatters once clumped-together audiences into infinite niches. The MPAA doesn’t just lobby on behalf of movie studios. Its membership includes TV-connected NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney, and Twentieth Century Fox.

That brings News Corp. into this issue, who leads the way in media consolidation and message crafting, and who leads or is a major participant in the next great merger race to create online supermonsters. As Yahoo mulls a deal with AOL (which gives Google even more control of the online ad space, Microsoft gladly protests) and outsourcing its search ads to Google in order to thwart a Microsoft buyout, News Corp. is said to be cavorting with Microsoft to up the ante. Microsoft, it is fair to say, has never been fond of all those open standards, or cloud-computing for that matter. What’s good for Google is usually bad for Microsoft.

Just to help you keep tabs on who is connected to whom in these incredible power-plays to have a nice, controlling interest in the eventual Grid, here is the flow chart: Microsoft, News Corp., the MPAA, the RIAA, all the telcos and cable companies, shareholders and board members who cross over onto other boards, world governments, one hand in somebody else’s pocket, the other hand on somebody else’s back, yes, it’s a beautiful trillion-dollar symphony, something very, very hard to compete with.

On the other side, it’s Google (hopefully to stay), a few others, and a growing landscape of concerned citizens who want, need, and deserve to keep an open Internet so there can be more Googles and YouTubes and Facebooks in the future. The other route brings sanitized, test-marketed and focus-grouped, tailored messages, approved content, and the high barriers to entry that keep true competition out of the marketplace.