NewsBiscuit

Scientists studying anti-matter in CERN have revealed that they have captured the illusive subtance – using the lullaby-voiced former synth-rave keyboardist Professor Brian Cox. The team of experts, who had a quantum string of minor hits in the early ’90s, made the breakthrough by accident.

‘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 Really Hard Maths at Liverpool’s John Moore University. ‘We’d managed to crank up helium protons to approaching the speed of light – which is really, really, fast. But then Coxy came in.’

‘He started telling us what was on the ‘specials’ board in the canteen, with his delightfully soporific northern lilt. We couldn’t believe it, the helium just slowed right down to about 10 miles an hour. We were like, ‘woah! Brian, you little poppet, 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 string theory and dark mater, 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 explained his technique: ‘Anti-matter is really small, and very shy. If you want to capture anti-matter, you have to make it calm by speaking to it really softly, with gentle but slightly raffish whimsy. I read it some stories from the New Scientist and Mixmag, never losing that gentle air of authority. Those little molecules can barely keep their nuclei’s open.’

The totally chilled antimatter was immediately sent to CERN’s remixers in residence Trevor Horn and Tomas Dolby for a dubstep reversioning with added sub-atomic orchestral stabs and sampling.

The team are already planning further experiments to see if the captured anti-matter responds to good post-rave synth riffs. Prof Cox remains sceptical though: ‘Currently this theory has no bassist in science.’