Opining Online

Rather, what socks are explains their behavior. As recently as 30 years ago, it was assumed dryers erratically connected with a parallel universe and socks went randomly back and forth, most being destroyed somehow in the transfer.

Now,  new theory explains why that is not necessarily true – Socks are Fermions:

I have come to the conclusion that socks are fermions, and that this explains much of the behavior of disappearing socks. (There may be other factors at play, of course) Clearly they are not bosons; you cannot make two socks occupy the same space: Put two socks on the same foot and they wll be layered, and there is a finite number you can fit into a washing machine or a dryer. Socks worn in the normal fashion are distinguishable by being on the left or right foot (or hand, in the case of the sock puppet effect; I won’t be discussing the very interesting Lamb-Chop-shift one can observe). The individual socks in a pair, however, are indistinguishable and they must have an antisymmetric wave function and thus obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and follow the Pauli exclusion principle.

Physics may well be on the way to solving this age-old mystery.

One of the things that has bothered me about being in a big hurry to pass a health care reform bill is that I could not figure out exactly what was trying to be reformed. A lot of the conversation seemed to be a discussion of whether the UK does it better or not.

I’d rather see more discussion of exactly what is wrong here beyond anecdotes about no access and insurance not covering needed medicines and procedures.

Here is one example of the kind of conversation I wish we were really having:

A Prescription For The Health Care Crisis

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that if he had an hour to save the world he’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes solving it.  Our health care system is far more complex than most who are offering solutions admit or recognize, and unless we focus most of our efforts on defining its problems and thoroughly understanding their causes, any changes we make are just likely to make them worse as they are better.

Just go read it, OK? Stay over there and check out some of his other writing.