But what colour should it be?

In the world of Douglas Adams' writing, people on the planet Earth are actually descendants from the "B Ark"... phone sanitizers, hair dressers, marketing boffins, etc. from another planet that got rid of it's "B" team of people. In one scene, Arthur Dent is trying to convince this "B" group to use fire, it being our logical first step as a species out of the caves, but the problem is the marketing boffins don't know what colour it should be... and do people want it fitted nasally?...

The remarkable achievements at CERN announced today - yes, they found the Higgs boson molecule! - have reportedly been undercut by some boffins who object to the font used in the announcement.

They used "Comic sans" as their font.

Some people love the "Comic sans" font. Some people hate the "Comic sans" font. Others never even notice font, as long as they can read what is written. Some people don't know what the term "font" means, and likely wouldn't care if they did.

But some boffins are criticizing this remarkable achievement because of the font used to officially announce it with. This is why Douglas Adams' writing is still so relevant to life as we know it. We have our own "B" team on this planet, and some of us think an Ark would be a reasonable idea........

(See this news article... the article is not complaining about the font, just pointing out the absurdity of the complaint.)

Are ideas really antimatter bubbles?

An idea comes to you in an instant.

If you are interested in the idea that just popped into your head, you keep it around and think about it. You make an effort to develop the idea and decide to think about it now or later. If not, it's gone, and will likely never come back.

The researchers at CERN have managed to capture atoms of antihydrogen. They've managed to keep them around for about 2 tenths of a second each. That's a long time for antimatter to exist where we can see it!

So are these atoms - that only exist for an instant - little idea bubbles? Are they fascinating ideas that scientists will suddenly realize they've just had? The nature of antimatter is a puzzle for scientists, and the idea of antimatter had to come from somewhere originally and pop into a scientist's mind. Do little atoms of antimatter exist everywhere for brief moments, not just in the CERN hadron collider? Are they little idea bubbles?

Will there be a renaissance of scientific ideas popping up in the near future because of the successful capture of antimatter? I bet there will be!

Did the universe just end?

The search for dark matter and the Higgs boson particles using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has started! They started slamming particles together today!

See http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE62T26K20100330

So are we gone yet? Did replicating the actions that happened when the big bang started the universe make everything hit the restart button?

No. Looks like we didn't stop.

Or did we? How would we know? Maybe our existence has more to do with a collective belief in our existence than in physics. Maybe the people who believed that the hadron collier would end the universe and tried to get the work stopped in law courts are gone. Maybe they ceased to exist a few minutes ago. Maybe just little bits of the universe have winked out of existence. How would we know? Has anyone got the inventory list so we could check things off?

This may be the results of an overactive imagination with a cold, but it does make me wonder.

Will the universe restart, or will some scientists just get happy?

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is back up and running! (Yes, that's it's name - who ever said scientists weren't creative - put an adjective in front of the noun, that makes it special, right?)

This is the machine CERN created to try to find the Higgs bosun particle, as well as any other interesting things that can be found when particles are smashed together. The particles they are looking for are the ones they expect were created 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang, and then disappeared almost immediately (I think). So they are trying to replicate the conditions that existed at the very beginning of the universe.

So will this be effectively hitting the "restart" button for the universe? That is a fear that some people have.

Or will this just get some scientists a Nobel prize? That would make some scientists very happy. That would make me happy, the "not the end of the universe" option.

Could humans actually do something that would end the universe? It seems a bit overly ambitious somehow. The good thing is, if it does happen, we will never know. Anything. Ever again. It would be the end. It's a nice, clean, full stop. I like the simplicity of it. It works for me.

For more interesting details see this and many other news articles available around the world: CBC news article