GENEVA – If you’ve ever wondered why, no matter how many you buy, you can never find a hair elastic when you need one, the scientists at CERN have finally discovered the problem: the act of buying hair elastics in the first place.
“It’s a relatively new field of study,” said Lucrezia Melfi, Leader of the String (and Hair) Theory project, pushing her own long hair back with exasperation. “It only came to the attention of scientists after women and long haired men started entering the field in large numbers in the 1970s, when a dearth of elastics led to hundreds of lives lost in grisly hair-related lab accidents. We finally know why.”
It’s taken decades and the use of the Large Hairdon Collider to confirm that a lack of hair elastics is the direct result of purchasing elastics. While the effect (which scientists are calling Schroedinger’s Coif) has now been observed, its mechanism is still poorly understood.
“We’d always assumed the reason people could never find elastics was that they only existed when they were observed, like celebrities or children, but the act of looking for an elastic has no effect on the likelihood of finding an elastic. It’s the act of purchasing them that determines their nonexistence,” Melfi explained, finally resorting to using a pencil to make a messy bun.
“Why is this happening? We think money might be some sort of anti-hair elastic, and when the two combine, both are annihilated. Or possibly it’s because most shopping bags have holes in them.”
Melfi’s team is now working on combining their hair elastic findings with Einstein’s Theory of Never Being Able to Find Matching Socks to create a Unified Theory of Where The Hell Did They Go.
