There’s a law of physics we all rely on: like quarks, mutatis mutandis, shoes come in pairs. If you find one of your shoes, the other one is nearby.

I hadn’t noticed the shoe-pairing law until recently because only recently has it begun to fail in our house, now that Clancy is on the scene. I believe the physics explanation involves the Casimir force and a puppy-induced increase of entropy.

Even with Clancy, the other shoe can usually be found within 15 feet, so shoe-pairing violations aren’t serious in themselves. Still, they make me wonder what other unnoticed laws hold together our world.

[2 April 2021]