Scientists studying anti-matter in CERN have revealed how they have captured the illusive subtance - using the lullaby-voiced Brian Cox. The team of experts, who had a string of hits in the early '90s, made the break-through by accident in their Large Hadley Collider.
"We first noticed the unusual power of Brian's voice when we were wooshing some atoms around in our big tunnel", explained Dr Ian Broudie, former front man with the Lightning Seeds and professor of Hard Maths. "We'd managed to crank up a helium to the speed of light, which is really fast. But then Coxy came in."
"He started telling us what was on the 'specials' board in the Science canteen, using his soothing, northern lilt. We couldn't believe it, the helium just slowed right down to about 10 miles an hour. We were like, 'woah! Brian-iac, you just broke the universe!' It was a mind-blowing discovery, a couple of us even managed to stay awake."
Matthew Priest, Dodgy's former drummer and a world expert on Commercial Physics, knew they'd got a breakthrough on their hands. "We thought Coxy should have a go at one of the classics: capturing anti-matter. We opened a fresh jar of the stuff, and before it could fly around and that, Brian just did his thing."
Professor Cox takes up the story himself: "Anti-matter is really small, and really shy. If you want to capture anti-matter, you have to make it calm. I made it calm by speaking really softly. I read it some stories from the NME and New Scientist. I read slowly and very softly into its little ears, until it could barely keep its nuclei's open".
The whole episode lasted for around 16 minutes, and was captured on Shaun Ryder's smartphone. The group, now called 'The Theory', took the recording to legendary science promoter Trevor Horn. "It was intense, you could actually feel the entropy in the room rising as Coxy performed. Things were really cooling down", explained Horn, sleepily.
"As soon as I woke up, I sent a copy off to the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, in the USA. "We knew we'd break the States, this was even more exciting than Courtney Love's latest project." Love has been working with her former band, on the Frank Black/Hole Study of Singularities.
The group are already planning a second experiment, to see if anti-matter responds to good riffs. Cox isn't entirely confident though: "The Theory has no bassist in science".
