CERN, FRANCE – An international team of researchers today announced the first-ever isolation of a sample of antipope, a rare substance predicted by current Pope Theory. Antipopes, which can be thought of as the ‘negative’ counterparts of ‘normal’ popes, may hold clues to the origin of the church itself.
The key breakthrough that made the team’s discovery possible was the development of a safe storage container for the highly-reactive antipopes. Upon collision, antipopes and popes annihilate one another, releasing massive quantities of energy, religious fervor, and high-energy popeons. The CERN team overcame this challenge by protecting their isolated antipopes in specially-designed enclosures, termed ‘Antipopemobiles’.
Scientists remain unsure, however, why antipopes are so rare in the first place.
“Current Pope Theory is perfectly symmetrical; that is, it gives no explanation why popes are common and antipopes are extremely rare. Our current understanding appears fundamentally flawed,” explained Dr. Gyra Mupta, the lead scientist on the study.
“Our theories say that empty space can give rise to pope-antipope pairs due to random fluctuations in the Papal Conclave field, but we are unsure how popes come to be without their antipope partners.”
The next step towards an understanding of pope-antipope dynamics may come from the Large Popeon Collider (LPC) that was recently completed in Europe. Many scientists suspect that the LPC may find evidence of a “God particle” that could explain the pope-antipope asymmetry.
When reached for comment, a papal spokesman said some stuff in like Spanish or something.
-JRV ’12