From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Apr 04 2003 - 06:09:26 MST
At 12:50 PM 4/4/03 +0100, Steve Davies wrote:
>Personally the question I want answering is what happens
>to all of those socks that vanish from washing machines and why is it only
>ever one half of of a pair that vanishes?
I'm surprised that so careful a thinker as Steve should still cling to this
common delusion. Careful study has shown that the *number* of socks is
always *conserved*. It is only the chirality that fluctuates. The best
current working model is that the rotation of swirling water causes a local
sock transition through a curled spatial dimension or brane, yielding
right-left transposition. This is an ordinary example of the far grander
chirality dynamics at the Big bang, during which more antimatter switched
to normal matter than vice versa, thus accounting for the presence of all
of us and our socks. Some counter this explanation by reference to the
distinctive color and markings of certain singleton socks. These skeptics
seem unaware of the role played by the color charge of quarks and gluons.
Damien Broderick
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