A would-be saboteur was placed in long-term storage today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland...home of the Helvetians, famous for cheese, watches, yodeling, and William Tell...
made the bizarre claim that he was from the future.
Hmmm... Lemme see... Got it! Astounding Science Fiction, August 1961. I forget what the title was...
Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man,
"What's that on yer head, bub?"
"It's a leather helmet!"
"What's it do?"
"Keeps things off my head!"
said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.
"If the world's gonna be destroyed how can you be from its future?"
"It ain't that far in the future!"
"Well then, how far in the future are you from?"
"'Bout a half hour."
The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines.
"Jorgensen! Sound the alarm! The Mountain Dew supply's been disrupted!"
"Alarm! Alarm!"
He also grabbed credit for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.
"Mon dieu! The man is a fiend!"
Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins.
"You, there! With the cooling fins on your shoulders! Step away from the garbage bin with your hands up!"
He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.
"Oh, yeah? What kind of fuel does it use?"
"Cheese."
Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age,
| They dare to correct the fashion sense of a man from the future!?! |
"Kit-Kats for everyone? And you want to prevent that?"
This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.
"Eureka!"
"You've found something, doctor?"
"Ummm... Never mind."
Professor Brian Cox, a CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."
"Good God, Professor! Would that make him...?"
"Yes. From some sort of alternate universe!"
Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.
"Yeah. I can't understand it. He ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and then a half hour later he was gone! Didn't even eat the bread!"
For background information see Accident at Large Hadron Collider shunts April Fools' Day to 1 November