The Nobel Prize winners may be celebrating, but they have been upstaged. A retired police detective believes he has discovered a fundamental force that connects all matter in the universe - and that it could help in the search for missing Madeleine McCann.

Danie Krugel claims to be able to locate a missing person anywhere in the world, using only a single strand of their hair. Put this into his mysterious "Matter Orientation System" (MOS) and, in less than 30 minutes, the man nicknamed "the locater" says he can give you their precise GPS co-ordinates.

Laugh you may, but on Sunday it was reported in an upmarket British newspaper that Krugel had helped police uncover "traces of Madeleine's whereabouts". Last July, he led her parents to a point on Praia da Luz beach where he claimed Madeleine's body "had either been temporarily buried or was still beneath the beach". The findings were taken so seriously by Portuguese detectives that they ordered two further searches of the beach.

In his native South Africa, police have regularly employed Krugel and his MOS to search for missing persons. In at least one case, it is claimed, his advice directly led to the finding of a body of a girl.

In the future, Krugel says, his machine will be able to help police instantly pinpoint murder suspects - and also "help geology and mining". What, you put gold in and it finds you a goldmine?

Exactly how the MOS works remains a closely guarded secret, but when The Herald contacted Krugel, he offered these cryptic clues. "I am of the opinion that there is constant communication between matter of the same origin," he says. "And in theory you should be able to trace that origin. I cannot give you all the scientific details. But we are talking about a combination code of atoms. Look in skin or hair or blood and you will get that combination."

And what is the nature of this "communication"; the force that, say, connects a missing person's hair with a missing person's body? Krugel would not say. But, in a style that will be familiar to fans of The Da Vinci Code, he did offer this tantalising cliffhanger: "I recommend you read up on the work of Nicolas Gisin".

Gisin, it transpires, is a scientist at the University of Geneva - a pioneer of quantum physics who made history in 1997 by showing that pairs of photons of light remain "entangled" even at great distances, theoretically as far apart as one end of the universe and the other.

Could a missing person really be in "quantum entanglement" with their hair? We put this proposition to two physicists, whose answers were spookily similar. (Perhaps they, too, are entangled.) "The answer is no," said Dr Chris Parkes of Glasgow University. "I cannot think of any force by which the hair and the person could be linked."

Quantum entanglement is a real physical phenomenon, but only between particles at the microscopic level. "As soon as you get trillions of atoms joined together - as you have even in a single strand of human hair - the delicate quantum entanglement is lost forever," said a second physicist, who asked not to be named. Proving entanglement between complex molecules "would be pretty amazing news and have far wider ramifications than a secret machine that is used to search for missing people".

Allan Jamieson, director of the Forensic Institute in Edinburgh, challenged Krugel to submit his machine to controlled scientific testing. "If this is true, why not put it forward for testing?" he asks. "It's simple. Just give him a lock of hair and ask him to find which grave it comes from."

Jamieson also points out that there is a prize of one million dollars on offer from the well-known sceptic James Randi for anyone who can demonstrate evidence of paranormal ability. And, he adds, even putting money aside: "Think how famous you would be if you were the person who discovered a new force of nature. You would be as famous as Einstein or Newton."

A Nobel Prize surely awaits. Doesn't it?