Change Name Of Comic Sans To 'Comic Cerns' Say Physicists After Higgs Boson Discovery

Change Name Of Comic Sans To 'Comic Cerns' Say Physicists After Boson Discovery

A physicist has started an online petition to change the name of hated font Comic Sans to 'Comic Cerns' after it was used in the Powerpoint presentation announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

The font was used by Dr Fabiola Gianotti of the Atlas project at Cern, as she gave the results confirming the particle's existence.

The Higgs Boson is the particle which gives other particles mass, and its discovery this week was hailed around the world as one of the most significant in decades.

However the use of Comic Sans was what caught many people's attention, with some including the font's creator complaining about the choice.

Now physicist and teacher Alby Reid has launched a campaign to instead enshrine the font in scientific history by calling for Microsoft to rename it 'Comic Cerns' in Windows 8.

"We were all moved by Dr Fabiola Gianotti's incredibly strange choice of font in announcing the recent results of Cern's ATLAS collaboration and feel that her use of Comic Sans has gone a long way to rehabilitate this awful, awful font."

Sadly the petition probably needs more momentum to get going - it currently has just 200 signatures.

But Reid remains undaunted:

"In recognition of the work of Professors Peter Higgs, François Englert and Robert Brout and others in the description of the Higgs mechanism by which vector bosons gain mass by interacting with the Higgs field; and in recognition of the work of the scientists and engineers at Cern's Large Hadron Collider, in particular the members of the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, in their search for the Higgs boson, the quantum of the Higgs field; we believe that Microsoft should rename 'Comic Sans' to 'Comic Cerns' in Windows 8 and in future releases of the Windows operating system. Renaming Comic Sans to 'Comic Cerns' would be a unique way of recognising the groundbreaking achievements of these scientists and engineers."

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