Dr Julian Cook's science laboratory

CERN has confirmed that if the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found the Higgs Boson by 2012, they’ll concede defeat.

People get upset when trying to understand the Higgs Boson, but there is only one question you really need to ask: Are you a Belieber?

Justin Bieber seems to be doing very well for himself but I must confess I’ve never seen him perform. By all accounts, he’s young enough to be my grandson but even thinking of him as a distant nephew feels rather uncomfortable.

His fans, the ‘Beliebers’, are quite insane and are to be avoided: there’s nothing as fetid and offensive as a 14 year-old human female. The work experience girl couldn’t keep her trap shut about the poor fellow. I renamed her ‘the nasty mongoose’ because that is exactly what she was.

But has this got to do with the ‘God Particle’’? Well, in Bieber terms, Justin is the Higgs Boson and Cern are the Beliebers.

Like Beliebers, Cern are obsessed with getting their hands on a pint-sized trouble maker who is playing hard to get. No one has seen or touched him – but the man who eventually does will be pretty special. Sometimes I dream I’m that man – and I know that Professor Cox shares my dream. Occasionally, the three of us feature together like some kind of wonderful Bacchanalian jamboree and all manner of exciting new scientific methods are revealed to me. This is why I’ve always championed benzodiazepines as crucial to the advancement of physics and why I’m irate at the woman in neuropharmacology for stopping my supply.

The nasty mongoose is like a top quark: she has mass which I could touch or strike as necessity dictated. But Justin Bieber is her reason to exist and it is probably because of him she is so comparatively massive to other quarks her age.

Thus, while I have never witnessed Bieber singing or indeed physically grabbed him, I must infer his existence because of his effect on the mongoose and also because of the alarming number of advertisements for his O2 Arena concert which keep appearing on every webpage I visit.

This Higgs is proving more elusive than ever and time is running out. But while we’ve got Professor Cox and the boundless scope of our imaginations, we shouldn’t kiss goodbye to the tantalising little rapscallion just yet.

And if by 2012 we’ve not gained a purchase on him, everything I’ve come to ‘beliebe’ about our universe is a lie and I may as well kill myself.

Dr Julian cook is a senior reserach fellow at the Institute for Studies

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Hipsters denied right to verbal communication

TRENDY, irony-obsessed young people are to be rendered mute and may only express their facile opinions via sandwich boards, it has been confirmed.

The nationwide program to pluck out hipsters’ tongues with rusty pliers was instigated after the 10,000th incidence of a young male with knowing facial hair and an interesting hat being overheard discoursing on how ‘the Nazis were actually pretty cool because their uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss’ or some equivalent, weapons-grade bullshit.

Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies said: “‘Hipster’ is a nebulous term but often the males look like stupider, more handsome versions of Daniel Kitson, while the girls currently have tattoos of cheesecakes and heavy spectacles with sarcasm-tinted lenses. They are loud and have never suffered.

“Basically they are the diametric opposite of Harry Patch.”

The first mass hipster muting took place in a Dalston warehouse last night, where they were lured by Facebook messages advertising an underground party where Djs including the Spunk Fist Tag Team and Blaze Cyborg Jnr would be playing ‘Italian vampire lesbian film soundtracks, ghetto-mong and skiffle, plus live paedophile VJs and human jenga’.

Muted hipster Tom Logan said via his sandwich board: “Stocky men held me down and repeatedly slapped me in the face until I was unconscious. When I woke up my mouth was very sore and empty.”

He then wrote: “Anyway after that we went and did shitloads of coke at Jamie’s place in Peckham and stayed up all night, then went to the shop and bought loads of cheap old school 80s sweets like flying saucers and shit, y’know, and just sort of threw them at each other in the street while burning around on our fixed wheel bikes.

“Also, I’m directing a short film about Godzilla in a breakdancing competition. And I’m collaborating on a piece of great immersive comedy theatre about moustaches and cot death. It’s rad.”

Onlooker Roy Hobbs said: “You have to hand it to the little fucker, despite his drastic change in circumstances he’s still determined to be an absolute twat and that does show some integrity.”

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