Yesterday, physicists at CERN announced what might be the greatest scientific discovery of our era: the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that helps explain how the universe is put together. In ways both meaningful and fanciful, social media was there to comment.

Of course, no celebration, no matter how monumental, can escape the snark of the internet. In this case, it was the font: the future Nobel laureates presented their epochal findings on slides written up in Comic Sans.

Possibly the biggest scientific discovery of our time, the #Higgs Boson, announced in glorious MS Comic Sans Font twitpic.com/a3pl0s

— Colin Eberhardt (@ColinEberhardt) July 4, 2012

Other comedic onlookers have latched onto the fact that the Higgs boson is the particle that gives mass, creating some memorable memes being passed around the interwebs:

But don’t worry, it’s not all mind-numbing word play and criticism, the internet can make you smarter too! Social media is lighting up with “plain English” explanations of the Higgs boson, and this animation from PhD Comics is one of the most popular:

Also, maybe you heard that this was a “5 Sigma discovery?” Physicist Brian Cox took to Twitter to explain:

5 sigma is the usual particle physics threshold for discovery. It roughly means that you’re 99.9999% sure

— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) July 4, 2012

I also noticed several tweets about the Indian roots of the Higgs boson, from observers who feel that this history is being ignored. Did you know that “boson” particles are named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose?

What do you think? Did social media help you understand this amazing discovery?

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