Large Hadron Collider finds car keys
It cost some Â£6.2 billion to build, but the Large Hadron Collider may have justified that enormous price tag after it finally located Professor Brian Coxâs lost car keys. The keys were lost by Cox in the 1990s while an undergraduate at the University of Manchester and his 1987 Nissan Micra has remained in an NCP car park ever since. âWhen the car keys disappeared it soon became clear that there was an effect here that had major ramifications for the world of physics,â said Cox. âThe keys had clearly undergone an inter-dimensional shift which had moved them through time, space, or one of the many other dimensions posited to exist, in such a way as to render them invisible to the human eye. Also, the car had been clamped and was clocking up Â£100 a day in storage charges, so it was vital we found an answer quick.â Professor Stephen Hawking suggested that the Large Hadron Collider was developed to unravel just these sorts of fundamental mysteries about the universe. âBrian was banging his head against the wall looking for the elusive car part,â said Professor Stephen Hawking. âIt was doing no good, though, so we decided to bang particles together instead, but at massive speeds until he could recall where the car keys were. We also hoped that the LHC could answer other questions such as âWhere are my glasses?â and âWhy did I come upstairs?ââ After years of experiments, the LHC, lying in a 27km tunnel running under the Franco-Swiss border, today finally located the missing keys in a 1.5m ridge running under the cushions on Coxâs sofa. âIt turns out that one of the missing dimensions predicted by string theory is actually down the back of the sofa,â explained Cox. âThis is a major scientific advance, but a further blow to relativity. It seems the space down the back of the sofa is far greater than its outward measurements suggest, and it acts like a black hole sucking in all matter around it. I believe that if we search down the back of the worldâs sofas we will find all the ships and aircraft that were believed lost in the Bermuda Triangle.â Cox is now hoping to win the Nobel prize with his discovery in order to help pay off the massive fine that is due to get his car unclamped.