On thinking out of the box

On thinking out of the box

Last night I invented faster-than-light space travel. The Warp Drive, if you please. You can thank me for it later.

Achieving warp speed, it turns out, is a spectacularly simple idea. With a limitless budget, the best minds of our generation (if we can tear them away from their current design work for McDonalds Happy Meal toys) and power sourced from several nearby stars, we'd be flying rings around Uranus and speeding off to wreck other people's planets in no time at all.

And the brilliance of my plan is this: We do not need all that warp coil bollocks and dilithium crystals much loved by Star Trek fans that may or may not bring about the end of the universe if you go above Warp 9. No!

All we need is a small cardboard box.

Then, all we need inside the box is a small atomic particle.

And that's where it gets a bit difficult, mainly because I don't appear to have a magnifying glass powerful enough to find it. I had the tiny bugger a minute ago, and I went and left it on the sofa...

The entire scheme swings on the recent research by men of SCIENCE, who have discovered a way to make a single atomic particle exist in two places at the same time. You know - move stuff from one place to another instantaneously.

Now, all they've got to do is find this particle, put it in a cardboard box, and force the cardboard box and the hulking space craft in which it resides to exist in two places at once, and we have invented faster-than-light travel. Or the teleport. Or both.

Suck on THAT Lt Cmdr Geordi LaForge.

This may sound like the Holly Hop Drive of Red Dwarf fame, and I suppose it is. But I have sat down and worked out - for the good of mankind, and the detriment of any alien race that comes into contact with our Space Chavs - how the thing actually works.

Just send a cardboard box, a force field and all your scientists and we might actually be onto something.

Nobel Prize, plz.

I am not mad.