Higgs Boson Found By Anonymous Internet Commenter?

You might have heard that the Higgs boson has been discovered by scientists at CERN. This is because people believe everything they hear on the Internet.

Let’s recap: all this got started with an anonymous comment on a blog, Not Even Right, run by a Columbia mathematician. It said that the guys at CERN had used that particle accelerator all those annoying religious nuts insisted was going to end the world were talking about some weird results they got and how it was totally, like, the Higgs boson.

Needless to say, there’s a lot irregular about this: the findings aren’t a silver bullet, and they might not even exist in the first place. But “Magic Particle We Barely Understand the Science Behind Exists” is a much catchier headline to journalists than “Anonymous Commenter Trolls Blog”. After all, most newspaper employees seem to barely comprehend the Internet, forget particle physics, but that doesn’t stop them from acting like they understand either.

[ via the Higgs bosoms at io9 ]