Graham Selwyn Fehrt was born in Perth in August 1911, the son of an Austrian sailor and a Scottish bordello keeper. Raised in the largest brothel in the highlands until the death of his mother when he was seven, he spent the remainder of his childhood in a remote farming community near Aberdeen, with his grandfather, who has been credited with stimulating the young boy's interest in science. In fact, evidence exists suggesting that the groundwork for many of Fehrt's later discoveries was laid during the 1923 haggis harvest, when one of these wild scottish beasts rolled over his grandfather, severely injuring the old man's bagpipes. During his stay at the hospital it is reported that Fehrt spent much of the time stalking the hospital grounds, flask of coffee in hand.
Upon his grandfather's demise, due to yet another bagpipes incident, this time involving a sheep, Fehrt set out into the world to make his fortune, and nothing is known of him until his arrival in Chicago in 1941, penniless and starving.
Holden Midlin was born in Chicago in 1899, child of an Indian Chief with Bison William's naughty east show, and Mavis McDonal, a Scot of Irish descent who had previously travelled the world, and had children to prove it. Midlin's education at the Chicago high school was unremarkable, and when he left it is alleged that his ability to count went as far as "ten, Jack, Queen, King, Ace".
Midlin went through a variety of jobs, before becoming the squash court attendant at Chicago University, where he first met Graham Fehrt, who had by now taken up his mother's trade. At that time there was great interest in the university, and Fehrt and Midlin where recruited by the military to take part in the cunningly named Donald Duck Deception plan no. II. This was to basically prevent the Germans from discovering the actual use of the squash court basement by using a decoy, in this case several of the younger scientists playing squash almost continuously. After the successful completion of the Manhattan Project, Fehrt and Midlin decided to work together, and from this partnership came many great discoveries, all now sadly forgotten, save for the Fehrt-Midlin Interaction.
Many people tend to use the classical analogy of the Fehrt-Midlin force being a mixture of the weak and strong forces, which it is. However, it can also be regarded as a totally new kind of force, the fifth fundamental force, and so in this way it is occasionally compared with the wave particle duality of light. This new type of force is of great interest, and has been said to be "Beard curlingly exciting and fringe scorchingly mind-blowing".
The Fehrt-Midlin force acts upon all matter, with varying degrees of magnitude, depending on the matter type. Initially we shall consider the assumption that the force is a mixture of the strong and weak forces.
The strong interaction is the force necessary to offset the electrostatic repulsion of nuclear particles. It is "strong" and has a short range. The weak interaction is produced during radioactive decay, and is generally "weak" with a large range.
It is usually assumed that the Fehrt-Midlin force, being a mixture, has a medium strength and medium range. However, this depends upon the substance used. Scientific experimentation has produced a list of various substances which are greatly affected by the F-M interaction. Many of these substances have great importance in life in general and are regarded as vital by many people. Two of the most affected and most common substances are chocolare and coffee, and this is the reason why most science laboratories have these substances in a variety of forms, usually in great quantities. The forces between the particles of these substances are unusually strong, and this is the main cause of the unusual properties encountered by researchers. The strength of the bonds between the particles is directly proportional to the size of the individual particles, and so the larger the particle, the stronger the force exerted. Here the unique properties of the F-M interaction show themselves. When the bonds between particles break, some time is occupied by the process; for the F-M force there is a constant, maximum amount of weakening that a bond can sustain in a given time. Thus larger particles with larger bonds take longer to separate than do smaller particles. This acounts for the discrepancy between cheap instant coffee and good chocolate cake, i.e. the smaller coffee particles dissolve quickly whilst the taste of chocolate lingers on the tongue for ecstatic minutes afterwards.
The process of bond breaking is beneficial to the consumer, for, as the bonds break, they release energy directly to the cells of the body, casuing revitalisation, and an overall increase in health and vigour, with a corresponding increase in longevity, thus causing such foodstuffs to be known as the elixir of life. However, a word of warning; consumption of large amounts of substances containing large F-M forces can be dangerous, as, on occasion, the bonds can overcome the disintegration constant and the attractive force changes to a repulsive one, the result being a large release of energy, destroying most objects within a sphere of radius 1.3756m (or to be more precise a gnat's whisker). The mass of substance at which this occurs is called the critical mass, which for chocolate cake is about 5kg, so most people are safe with moderate consumption.
All of this, so far, is based on the assumption that the Fehrt-Midlin force is a mainly attractive force, which it isn't. The second way of looking at the F-M interaction is that of it being a mainly repulsive force.
The Fehrt-Midlin interaction can be used to contain the smoke particles found inside most electrical components and devices. The actual type of device is denoted by the colour of the smoke, although this depends on the usage of the device, and the actual season also appears to have some bearing upon the matter (it is not uncommon to see smoke in the form of pink elephants during the Christmas season, for example).
This theory of smoke and the F-M interaction explains one of the modern day mysteries of science - the cathode ray oscilloscope. Many people believe that electrons stimulate particles in a zinc sulphide screen; this is untrue. The screen is in fact a window into a smoke chamber. The passage of electrons through this chamber causes the breaking of the F-M forces holding the smoke particles together, and the subsequent release of energy is in the form of photons, in the visible band of the EM spectrum. This explains why many oscilloscopes are inaccurate, due to the limiting factor of the disintegration constant, thus causing a need for "fudge factors" when operating the oscilloscope.
When the smoke does escape, as eventually happens, it can be seen that the device will not work. This is due to the fact that the F-M interaction, having nothing else upon which to act, has seized control of the device and frozen all operational parts. The release of the smoke also causes damage as the backlash from the released F-M forces causes great energy release, and consequently a great amount of heat builds up. This causes the device to become warm, and the list is long of the names of potentially great scientists whose grants have been revoked, on the grounds of an inadvertantly manually manipulated component whose smoke has recently vanished into thin air, when demonstrating for the grants committee.
The only way to mend the empty devices is to fill them again, preferably with the correct type of smoke. Thousands of years of selective breeding has evolved a race of white coated supeerhumans with the ability to spoon feed smoke back into a reluctant component, using the same method as that for demonstrating brownian motion. This can often be dangerous, as it is necessary for all the smoke particles to be held by the F-M force, and so this force is relatively large. Thus initially when there are few particles present there is a very large force acting on each of them, and this causes stress within the internal structure of the nuclei. The discoverer of this particular effect was the well known Greek philosopher and physicist Philip Lancelot Ato, and it is in his memory that the individual smoke particles are called atos. Thus, when the conflict between the F-M force and the nuclear forces becomes too large and the particles disintegrate it is known as splitting the atom.
Finally, it is regrettable that few if any scientists around the world know anything about the Fehrt-Midlin interaction, and it is to counteract this gross ignorance in scools that this document has been produced. As an example of what could have been we shall consider cold fusion. Research has revealed that the F-M interaction was to blame for this; it is believed that the wire originally used in the experiment had previously been used to stir coffee, and so was contaminated. Consequently, when the experiment commenced, a as yet uninvestigated effect of the F-M interaction was produced, causing the release of large amounts of energy, with very little temperature change.