The Missing Socks
One may lose one's shirt, even the shirt off one's back, but... lose one's socks?!
Have you ever observed the following very odd phenomenon?
Remove the clothes, including several pairs of socks, from the washing machine and place them in the dryer, and then, when you empty the dryer, a sock is missing.
If you look in your clothes closet, you will notice one more wire coat hanger than was there before you did the laundry.
Ergo, missing socks are reconstituted as wire coat hangers.
I have witnessed this occurrence on more than several occasions and may even have determined the transformation hypothesis.
Recently, I discovered, nay, received confirmation of this from Schrödinger (cat not included) and even the highly-esteemed Stephen Hawking has speculated on the syndrome.
Samsung UK commissioned a study to explain why socks are lost and developed the 'Sock Loss Formula' or 'sock loss index' equation which claims to predict the frequency of sock loss for any given individual.
The earliest documented evidence of men wearing both socks and sandals together was found through an Ancient Roman, North Yorkshire, archaeological site in England.
Analysis of the remains of a sandal determined Romans were already doing it 2,000 years ago... whether they lost their socks when drying has yet to be determined.
If black socks were worn with sandals, it would immediately give away the nationality of the wearer thereof as being, not Roman but, German.
Looking into this socking state of the missing socks affair from the scientific point of view, as opposed to staring into the abyss, altho', 'Sock in a Dryer' is yet another example of Schrödinger's 'Cat in a Box' theory.
If one could see inside the black hole of the clothes dryer while it is spinning, it would appear to be a vortex and, vortex-like structures, made of Bose-Einstein condensate, can exist in black holes. Therefore, instead of Hawking radiation, these objects can have strong magnetic fields.
Scientists from Ludwig Maximilian University and Max Planck Institute of Physics studying rapidly rotating black holes, previously considered such objects with extreme rotation speeds to be rare, but now, are sure this is most of the singularities in the Universe... as is the rotation speed of the clothes dryer.
As socks are more than likely the lightest item in the dryer and, as the dryer rotates at a relatively low speed, only one such sock is sucked into the vortex and disappears into the black hole... only to go through the space-time continuum and reappear reconstituted, as a thin, wire hanger in the clothes closet.
All of which could help explain the very fabric of our existence.
I wonder if Joni Mitchell knew she was 'scientifically' correct when she wrote, 'We are stardust' in her song, 'Woodstock'.
Despite the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a law in quantum physics which limits the precision two related variables can be calculated, all socks exist together, in the past, the present and the future and, as proved, so do wire hangers.
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