A couple of weeks ago, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they’d made “significant progress” in the search for a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson ― the so-called God particle.

Two teams of physicists conducting separate analyses of data collected by the Hadron supercollider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, noticed a similar rise in indication of particle decay in approximately the same range ― 125 gigaelectronvolts.

I have no idea how much a GeV is, but I gather it’s an eensy-teensy but measurable number, which makes this big news in the world of theoretical physics. I can only imagine what the online comments will be:

Doglover12xx: I don’t believe in physics, but I have an opinion. Why did this have to be a socialist, European-type deal? You liberals are so stupid. The acronym for European Organization for Nuclear Research is EONR, not CERN.

RoadWarrior\999: Aren’t physicists all atheists? I resent that a bunch of them are atheists using the term “God particle.” Why didn’t they call it the “Satan Particle” or the “I don’t know” particle? Why are you always bashing Christians?

DrNitmitzz: Obama is a Muslim. And what about Solyndra? Why aren’t you writing about solar energy scams or why Michelle Obama wants to outlaw meat?

Thank you for those comments. Doglover, CERN is the acronym for the French name of the organization. RoadWarrior, “God particle” was coined by Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, because its discovery would help explain creation.

This is the kind of story the online commentariat would go crazy over. It deals with science and conventional beliefs about creation. If the Higgs boson is discovered, it would mean that the Higgs field exists ― the space that exists between everything else. If the Higgs field imparts mass to particles, it would tend to close the loop on particle physics, meaning that science had finally revealed “the theory of everything.”

The New York Times quoted Lawrence M. Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University, on its significance: “If the Higgs is discovered, it will represent perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect in recent memory, vindicating 50 years of the building of one of the greatest theoretical edifices in all of science, and requiring the building of the most complicated machine that has ever been built.”

How would the commentariat react to that?

Gipper717: I resent that guy saying “one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect in recent memory.” May I remind you of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? What about “Honey, I forgot to duck”? You guys are morons.

MoPatriot87: Let me see if I’ve got this straight: You’re saying science and the hunt for the origins of the universe are important. But don’t I remember that Hitler and the Nazis were big into science too? Does the name Josef Mengele ring a bell?

DrNitmitzz: Obama is a Muslim.

Crone319: Higgs bosons are nothing new. My grandfather was part of the greatest generation and he invaded Normandy in a Higgs boson.

Again, thanks for participating in this robust online discussion. I feel stupider already. You try to write about an important advance in man’s knowledge of the universe and you get Hitler analogies.

Sure, Godwin’s Law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” but Mengele? And Crone, if your grandfather invaded Normandy, it was in a Higgins boat piloted by a “bosun,” not a Higgs boson.

One of the great things about social media ― and indeed, about the entire Internet ― is that now people can express their opinions on topics about which they not only know absolutely nothing and about which they really don’t even want to think.

This does not add much to the sum of human knowledge. In fact, it can be argued that the Internet is making us all dumber ― when everyone’s an expert, no one is an expert. But it sells a lot of advertising and, Lord knows, I’m the last guy who should complain about selling advertising.

Here’s what’s weird: The same European Organization for Nuclear Research is where this whole thing started. In 1989, CERN guy Tim Berners-Lee wrote the HTTP language that made it easy for computers on the Internet to link documents. He gave documents addresses now known as Uniform Resource Locators and wrote a program so that clients on what he called the “World Wide Web” could locate hypertext documents.

Here was a guy who was trying to make it easier for really, really smart people to talk to each other and spread human knowledge. He made it so easy that pretty soon the Internet was full of porn and cat videos and trolls hiding behind phony names.

DrNitmitzz: Obama is a Muslim.

By By Kevin Horrigan
Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Readers may email him at khorrigan@post-dispatch.com. ― Ed.

(St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
(MCT Information Services)