Physicists at the National Physics Laboratory in Twickenham, South-West London have succeeded in exceeding the speed of light. In what must be the biggest scientific breakthrough since the eight-track, the four man research team has neatly sidestepped Einstein’s theory of relativity and accelerated incident particles (hydrogen atoms) to speeds of above 3x10^8 m/s.

A fission-based cyclotron is augmented with a negative quark destabiliser, and the environment is given a pseudo-ambient temperature of absolute zero. Then a sole occupant hydrogen atom is heated to an actual temperature of over 10,000K within the pseudo-environment whilst it is subjected to a computer controlled tachyon polariser. This results in the passive acceleration of the hydrogen atom, which, when the polarity of the neutron flow is reversed gives an induced velocity of above light speed.

Team leader, Dr. Gustave Ravel was keen to explain to us the implications of this amazing breakthrough: “Basically we have achieved the super-acceleration of our incident particle by fooling it into thinking it is travelling much slower than it actually is”. From this we can only conclude that its ok to bend the laws of physics providing these laws don’t actually know they’re being broken. It’s also quite worrying that Dr. Ravel thinks that an atom has the power of thought in the first place.

Dr. Gustave Ravel

“Unfortunately we are still limited to working on an atomic scale.” he added, “Our experiments show that to work with a larger subject requires an exponential increase in energy.”

He went on to show us some sums that he had done earlier, which covered several sheets of A4. The conclusion drawn was basically that in order to accelerate something the size of, say, a small hamster would require approximately the same amount of energy used to power the whole of Wales for one year. Ravel’s colleague Dr Piers de Lavison added that the government had turned down the NPL’s request that Wales be ‘turned off for a year’, and also that the NPL had rejected their subsequent offer of ‘the Isle of Man for a couple of months” as most of the people who live theredon’t use electricity, and those that do are called Nigel Mansell.

We then asked the team if this meant that time travel was now possible, as all science fiction reckons that Einstein’s law of relativity and the light barrier are the only things in the way of it. Dr. Ravel said we should ask his father, an executive on the project, who had initially suggested some of the scientific processes involved.

Ravel Sr.

The old man introduced himself as “Professor ah, Justin Ravel”. When we asked him about his contributions, he said “they weren’t strictly all my ideas, I had a little help from a very close friend of mine.” Naturally we probed him further (although Spunk Monkey’s anal probe had been confiscated at the front gate), and asked him about the possibility of time travel, but all he added was “ask me in 20 years time”. We told him that we would do so if he were still around. He seemed to find this much funnier than he should have. Doing that funny old-man-laughing-into-his-beard thing, he refused to answer any more of our questions. The only thing left to do was to go down the pub with Dr. de Lavison, who turned out to be quite a wag.