Famously dubbed "the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator," the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the quest for the Higgs Boson particle have been a popular subject of news-media coverage and online curiosity since its launch in September 2008. Perhaps due to the mission's highly complex nature that is incomprehensible to most of us outside the scientific community, the LHC project has been dubiously portrayed in pop culture as a potential trigger of a man-made apocalypse, which inevitably led to lulzy Photoshop parodies and gag sites speculating on the impending arrival of a tiny black hole on Earth—a hypothetical disaster also known as "division by zero."
Almost four years later, the much anticipated announcement of Higgs Boson’s discovery earlier this week was met with varying online reactions. For the most part, people seemed to be coping with their inability to understand its actual significance, followed by a slew of YouTube videos trying to explain the theoretical concept in as plain-spoken English as possible. Meanwhile, Redditers criticized the rampant use of the buzzword "God particle" in the news headlines, while Twitter users zeroed in on the CERN physicists' ill-advised choice of MS Comic Sans as the typeface for their historically monumental presentation. Check out the slideshow for some of the most notable examples of parodies and jokes surrounding the Large Hadron Collider.
Image via Know Your Meme
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