With CERN's Large Hadron Collider finally coming online, watercoolers around the world will soon be abuzz with talk of Higgs bosons, gluons, and other mind-blowing subatomic thingies. How to keep track of all that quantum fluff? It's easier than you think. Fans of shows like Survivor, American Idol, Top Chef, or America's Next Top Model already have the tools they need to wrap their heads around the fundamental bits in our universe. Turns out, if you understand reality TV, you can understand reality.

Gluons are the Donald Trumps, Tyra Bankses, and Mark Burnetts of the subatomic world. Just as these executive producers (often doubling as onscreen overlords) dictate the rules and force contestants into tightly knit alliances for survival, gluons wield what's called the strong nuclear force, impelling quarks to clump together into the neutrons and protons of an atom's nucleus.

There are six types of quark, arbitrarily named up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. Think of them as the personality types that make every reality show go: the gay one, the jock, the bumpkin, the minority, the brainiac, and the drunken train-wreck girl. They always form alliances (called hadrons), and, well, they work best in threesomes. Hot!

We know the Higgs boson particle must exist — it's why matter has mass. But physicists have been unable to observe it. Have folks like Kelly Clarkson found the Higgs boson of reality TV — enduring stardom? Let's hope so. Because like the real Higgs boson, if lasting fame isn't possible, the whole Theory of Everything will need to be reconsidered.

Photons carry electromagnetism, which bonds electrons to nuclei, and generally keep the excitement level up. Zooming around at the speed of light, these energetic particles hold the whole shebang together — just like Ryan Seacrest, Idol's charismatic liaison between judges, contestants, and viewers.

Many shows have a panel of regulars that sit on the sidelines and observe. This is the lepton family. Some, like electrons, matter (Tom Colicchio).Some, like muons, are overblown and unstable (Simon Cowell). Others, like neutrinos, pass through without ever making contact with reality (Paula Abdul).

W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which causes other particles to decay. These are like the parents, ex-lovers, and others who pop into a show merely to wreak havoc. Think Flavor of Love's Tiffany Pollard, aka New York, who returned in season two to terrorize anew.

Illustrations by Kirsten Ulve

Six years after its official launch, the consumer electronics industry's high-definition successor to DVD still hasn't taken off.

That's got manufacturers concerned enough to take action. Fortunately for consumers, the action will include lowering prices, adding features and integrating players into "connected ecosystems" that let users take advantage of increasingly popular online media as well as content that comes on shiny plastic discs.

Three main factors contribute to the perception that the now-dominant high-definition Blu-ray disc standard is stagnating: high overall prices, a general satisfaction with the current DVD format and buyer confusion in the midst of competing and multiplying technologies.

"The [Blu-ray format] is being adopted in a similar pattern as previous technologies, but it is not being adopted at the same [rate]," says Paul Erickson, Director of DVD and HD Market Research for DisplaySearch. While DVD also took years to become popular, he says, the adoption curve for Blu-ray is even longer and is fraught with bumpy obstacles, such as a few DRM security code and playback problems.

The two-and-a-half-year standards war with a competing high-def format, HD DVD, certainly didn't help. The battle ended in early 2008 when HD DVD's last major supporter, Toshiba, threw in the towel, but consumer confusion lingers. A tough economy has also slowed consumers' acceptance of the format.

At next week's CEDIA 2008 conference, an annual gathering of television and home theater manufacturers, retailers and installers, expect to see an orgy of competing Blu-ray players. Some will focus on low prices (like Philips and Netlogic), and others will highlight features that integrate their physical content with wireless systems to download content from the internet (such as BD Live).

Still, not everyone is convinced that these measures will help Blu-ray. Josh Martin of the Yankee Group says there are still too many "unclear messages" surrounding the format (such as unconventional BD spec profiles, which offer different versions of a player's capabilities) that throw that ecosystem out of whack.

There's also a value disconnect: Most people can't justify purchasing a Blu-ray player that costs five times as much as a DVD player -- especially if it's not five times better. "The opportunity lies in creating a simple, mass-market device," says Martin. So far, that device hasn't arrived, despite tries by everyone from Sony to Magnavox.

Until that device arrives, Martin says, a small price change (like Sony's recent 25 percent drop announcement), or even a cool spec upgrade won't make a difference. "Blu-ray will continue to struggle towards the end of [2008] because the format adoption is driven by price," Martin concludes.

Andy Parsons, a senior vice president at Pioneer and chair of the Blu-ray Association, sees a different side. He points to the 8 million Blu-ray players already sold this year (on pace to triple last year's sales) as an example that people are excited about Blu-ray and HD technologies in general, and will respond to more aggressive features:

"People say [low Blu-ray sales last year] were because of a lack of demand but it was really a lack of supplies. The demand was high," Parsons says.

The shortage wasn't caused by the difficulty and expense of creating Blu-ray discs and players, which many critics of the format often cite, but because manufacturers simply didn't expect to sell that many players in the first place, Parsons says.

Given the state of change, companies at CEDIA 2008 are focusing on developing the technology, regardless of the price. Pioneer will release a new Elite player next week that the company says will surpass every other high-end player in quality, but it comes with a heart-stopping $2,000 price tag. Yamaha is coming out with its own high-end player, as is up-and-coming Sherwood. And, it seems, every big-time audio maker at CEDIA is preparing huge systems to blow up the high-end sound produced by these players.

But that relative excess is the heart of the problem, says Gartner analyst Steve Kleyhans. For him, the entertainment ecosystem is simply too expensive to keep up with. In order to fully realize the value of a Blu-ray player's high-definition features, families also need to buy new HDTVs, new speakers and who knows, maybe an extra fluffy couch. Watching an HD movie on the 14-inch analog TV just won't cut it.

That's why Kleyhans predicts that more HDTVs will be sold as more Blu-ray players and other high-def media proliferates.

What about the threat from downloadable or streaming internet video? Interestingly, most manufacturers and analysts we talked with do not believe that online media is an immediate threat to optical discs.

First, the national bandwidth infrastructure is incomplete and can't come close to delivering HD movies on a wide enough scale to compete with physical discs within the next five years. Second, the market for set-top boxes that display internet video on your TV offers too many options, and most services are still incomplete (for example, Roku's set-top box only provides access to 10 percent of the Netflix catalog). And third, as Martin concludes, the experience is "still not as simple as popping in a disc."

It looks like for the majority of people, popping a disc in a slot for entertainment is proving too hard of a compulsion to let go. It's just going to take awhile before that disc is a Blu-ray one.

Jeremy Mayer collects antique typewriters, but he doesn't display them in a curio cabinet. Instead, he tears them apart, then turns the components into sleek, sci-fi-inspired bugs, skeletons and anatomically correct human figures.

Mayer, who describes his work as a cross between Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical drawings and the gritty futures imagined by sci-fi maestros William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, assembles his artwork without welding, soldering or gluing.

Left: It takes roughly 40 typewriters and 1,000 hours for Mayer to assemble a full-scale figurine like this reclining female form. He's made only three full-size human figures over the last 14 years, but as he prepares for a spring show in San Diego, he'll construct four in 2008.

"I'd been trying to get my figures to look less creepy," said Mayer. "This one has so much personality and presence, which helps."

Mayer put together this metallic bust for a 2005 art show in the Seattle area. To fashion the hair, he fitted multiple typebars onto the mechanical cranium and pulled out the innards of a machine to create steel skin.

Later, Mayer realized he created the head in his likeness. "He's somewhat of a broken-looking character," said Mayer. "And somehow it looks exactly like me. I hope to do more of them."

Mayer's creations, like this skeletal aluminum framework, can stand close to seven feet tall and often weigh between 60 and 100 pounds.

"I didn't make him anatomically correct, because I thought people would freak out about a robot with a penis," said Mayer. Now he's ready to go further with this piece, which he finished in 1994.

"I may retrofit it," said the artist, who often travels to homes where his artwork is displayed to tweak the designs.

Although perfecting steely skeletons is Mayer's main building obsession, he also likes to assemble macabre felines. He estimates that he's made about 14 of them -- and they are always popular with buyers.

"All you have to do is look at StumbleUpon and see how much people on the internet love cats," said Mayer. They tend to stand about two feet tall.

"I'm not going for whimsy," said Mayer, who experimented with a series of machine masks like this one for a show. "So I will probably never do a set [of the masks] again." Still, Mayer says he enjoys toying around with spare parts that don't end up in one of his massive pieces.

To create his mecha-cricket, Mayer fashioned the guts of a Royal typewriter into the abdomen and thorax. In order to keep the body color uniform, he salvaged similar pieces from the typewriter graveyard in his studio.

The legs are bent keys, and the head was made from a dismantled rubber pad. The insect measures about 18 inches long, from its spindly legs to the tips of its antennae.

This standing humanoid was commissioned by a Star Trek fanatic and friend of Mayer's who wanted a sculpture with robotic capabilities and trolled eBay for parts.

Mayer installed a Handy Board processor in the chest cavity and rigged it to a motion sensor and controls that cause the head to wiggle and the eyes to blink.

"The actual mechanics work really well," said Mayer.

Mayer often takes inspiration from the shape of the typewriter itself to mold his figures. He prefers to dismantle Royal Safari typewriters for his female creations, using the parts for the inner thighs, labia and breasts.

"That's how the typewriter was made in the first place," said Mayer. "The shape resembles the human body and forms of nature."

Mayer, 36, crafts his typewriter creations in this studio in Tahoe City, California.

He scours flea markets and second-hand stores weekly for vintage versions of the original word processor. After breaking the machines down by hand, Mayer spends hours categorizing the parts.