The Great Sock Mystery

[Doc. Josh]

This is in regards to a great sock mystery, im sure everyone knows what im speaking of here. I buy socks all ten pairs of them and within a week im missing half! This has gone on forever! Any help in the location and wharabouts of these socks? Under the dryer possibly but none under mine. left on the beach hardly only sandles, nobody borrows my clothing so thats out. Anybody have the same issue here? Or is this just another conspericy?

[ajb]

Socks are fermions, they do not like to be together. They can form Cooper pairs as long as there is some arbitrarily small force of attraction between them; they can form a bosonic bound state when you roll them together and these states can form a Bose-Einstein condensate when placed in the sock draw.

 

However, when in the sock draw the quasi-particle state of socks can disassociate due to ambient thermal fluctuations allowing one or both socks to quantum tunnel out of the draw. The liberated sock(s) will just drift off never to be seen again.

 

You can also speed up this process of dissociation by adding thermal energy to the Cooper pairs via the washing machine or tumble dryer. Again, one or both of the socks can quantum tunnel out of the washing machine or dryer never to be seen again.

 

Note that sock number is not a conserved charge in nature. It is only appropriately conserved in general and can be violated to a huge degree.

Edited May 27, 2011 by ajb

[mississippichem]

TV remotes also display similar phenomena. Remote controls are like virtual photons. Finding a remote is akin to violating

[math] E = \sqrt{m^{2}c^{4} + p^{2}c^{2}} [/math]

So if you find a remote, you must give back the borrowed [math] E [/math] by losing a remote tomorrow to prevent a causality violation.

Edited May 27, 2011 by mississippichem

[ajb]

The TV remote also obeys a kind of anti-quantum rule:

 

The probability of finding the exact location of the TV remote is identically one, unless you are looking for the TV remote then the probability is an inverse function of the desire to find the TV remote.

 

Many real world objects obey this rule. This can be paraphrased as "if you really want or need it you won't find it".

Edited May 27, 2011 by ajb

[mississippichem]

The TV remote also obeys a kind of anti-quantum rule:

 

The probability of finding the exact location of the TV remote is identically one, unless you are looking for the TV remote then the probability is an inverse function of the desire to find the TV remote.

 

Many real world objects obey this rule. This can be paraphrased as "if you really want or need it you won't find it".

 

So perhaps we can conclude that [math] \Psi ^{*}\Psi_{remote} [/math] is not [math] \textbf{L}^{2} [/math] integrable?

[CaptainPanic]

Solution for socks: Throw away all your socks. Then buy 20 pairs of identical socks.

 

I find that - surprisingly - the amount of lost socks has dropped dramatically since I introduced the sock drawer with only identical socks. This has led me to believe that the socks are not lost, but that the person searching for them just cannot find them when they are needed (often in the morning, even before coffee). Or at the very least, the frustration has become significantly less...

 

Alternatively, perhaps there is a sort of critical mass needed to prevent socks from escaping.

 

One thing is for sure: we can only speculate. It shall always remain a mystery. (And maybe it's better that way).

[ajb]

So perhaps we can conclude that [math] \Psi ^{*}\Psi_{remote} [/math] is not [math] \textbf{L}^{2} [/math] integrable?

 

The problem is very similar to that in quantum gravity. One cannot in reality separate the observer from the system. For the TV remote we can approximately do this if one has no desire to find the remote. One needs to show that the observer decouples from the system in this limit.

 

As soon as you want to find the remote you are part of the system and cannot be considered as part of the external environment. This messes up all we know about standard quantum theory. You might want to invoke more general theories of logic here to begin to understand this; Topos theory may help a la Isham. But I doubt this is for the faint hearted!

 

Solution for socks: Throw away all your socks. Then buy 20 pairs of identical socks.

 

Ah yes, appeal to the thermodynamics of indistinguishable particles. The Fermi-Dirac distribution is important here.

Edited May 27, 2011 by ajb

[mississippichem]

Arrr, the laws of physics...she be a harsh mistress

 

-Bender

[swansont]

Socks are fermions, they do not like to be together.

 

Yes.

 

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/3411

[ajb]

I also wonder if we can explain socks "leaking" off M2 and/or M5 branes into the bulk. This could explain why we cannot find our lost socks, but I expect that we will have to take great care in our compactification to get near the low energy phenomenology of socks as we know then in our 3+1 dimensional world. Also, I am sure we would end up with supersymmetric-socks (SSsocks) and we than have to figure out a dynamical mechanism to break this symmetry.

[imatfaal]

it's all down to the fact that socks without holes are in effect an M2 brane - it is all part of Horava and Witten’s Heterotic M theory and the notion of “upstairs” and "downstairs" solutions

 

 

Requiring the metric on R ^1;9 x S¹ to be Z₂ symmetric is equivalent to considering an arbitrary metric on the orbifold R ^1;9 x S¹/ Z₂ where the interval S¹=Z² comprises only half of the original circle. This latter approach has been termed the downstairs picture, whereas the alternative choice of working on a smooth manifold goes under the name of the upstairs approach.

http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=960253386&dok_var=d1&dok_ext=pdf&filename=960253386.pdf

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/9711/9711014v1.pdf

 

the answer is quite clear - we need to encompass both forms of solution - the socks are both upstairs and downstairs; there is always a positive finite possibility that if the left sock is upstairs then the right is downstairs.

[Marat]

When I first went to university I bought all black socks so I wouldn't have to waste any valuable time sorting socks (yes, I am that crazy). Anyway, since I have also always been plagued by the missing sock problem, I doubt that buying socks all of one type will help, though it does reduce the problem of mismatches created by the random loss of socks to zero.

 

A similar puzzle arises with respect to the single shoe one often sees by the side of the expressway while driving along. Why is it always just one shoe, given the very small percentage of one-legged persons whose prosthetic limb does not have an artificial foot which also requires a shoe, peg-legs being out of fashion since the early 19th century? Can it really be the case that someone loses just one shoe and continues walking along the expressway without having noticed anything unusual about his gait? Is someone just hurling shoes out the car window?

 

A similar case has occurred recently with single disembodied feet washing up in running shoes along the coast of British Columbia and Washington state. Almost all of these have been right feet, and there have appeared seven or eight over the last few years. Other, matching body parts have not appeared. If only these feet had been shoeless, perhaps at least the single-shoe-by-the-highway problem could have been solved.

 

The sock problem, which has been quite generally observed, for some reason doesn't count as empricial evidence against the conservation of mass. It just shows how we are so strongly committed to our scientific theories that we refuse even to consider good empirical evidence against them.

[michel123456]

This is in regards to a great sock mystery, im sure everyone knows what im speaking of here. I buy socks all ten pairs of them and within a week im missing half! This has gone on forever! Any help in the location and wharabouts of these socks? Under the dryer possibly but none under mine. left on the beach hardly only sandles, nobody borrows my clothing so thats out. Anybody have the same issue here? Or is this just another conspericy?

 

What a relief to know I am not the only one in the world!

 

It is a conspiracy.

Women get totally crazy when they encounter a naked male wearing only one sock, searching desesperately for the other. ALWAYS put your pants first. These corrupted females want to put the other sock... yes. There.

[Moontanman]

It's obviously the underwear gnomes, they have branched out in an effort to diversify and drive even more people crazy....

[Royston]

The problem is very similar to that in quantum gravity.

 

No it isn't, quantum gravity is incredibly complicated....loosing socks is incredibly easy. Anyone in there right mind can loose a sock, but it takes years of dedication to come even close to slightly understanding QG. If genius was based on sock loss, then I am clearly a whopping genius, which I'm not !

[ajb]

No it isn't, quantum gravity is incredibly complicated....loosing socks is incredibly easy. Anyone in there right mind can loose a sock, but it takes years of dedication to come even close to slightly understanding QG. If genius was based on sock loss, then I am clearly a whopping genius, which I'm not !

 

True, but I am not talking about losing a sock, I am talking about explaining why socks are lost.

 

A simple analogy; everyone can fall off a log, but can everyone explain Newtonian gravity? LOL

[Royston]

True, but I am not talking about losing a sock, I am talking about explaining why socks are lost.

 

I had a quick look on google earth, and the socks are floating just off the coast of Iceland. I have no idea how they got there, or by what means (on the backs of turtles?) in any case, they are there for the taking !