Schrödinger's Rinse Cycle?

This has apparently been around the net for awhile, but I just ran across it for the first time and since I've been on a little geek binge I thought it was worth some riffing.

Physycist Brian J. Reardon brought his knowledge of quantum physics to the problem of socks that go missing from the dryer, as well as the mysterious but related problem of other people's socks appearing in a public washer or dryer that was empty when checked.

Professor Reardon suggests that the same forces at work in the arcane corners of quantum mechanics somehow operate at the macro level to produce similar results in socks. You will note he uses a lot of equations, so please take necessary precautions when reading his article, like keeping your index finger on the scroll button of your mouse to enable a quick escape before catatonia sets in. Please, profit from my hard-earned experience.

Anyway, the professor's Quantum Theory of Laundry (QTL), takes advantage of a peculiar property of some subatomic doodads, like photons or electrons. These doodads can appear at one point to be particles, but at other times they act like waves -- this is why I called them doodads, because saying they are "subatomic particles" is not always accurate. Experiments designed to detect photons or electrons if they are particles will measure them and prove they are particles. But experiments designed to detect them if they are waves will measure them and prove they are waves. In other words, there is no way to know whether they are particles or waves until the experiments are done, and the experiments themselves will "cause" them to act like particles or waves.

An Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger described some aspects of this relationship in a very complicated equation and illustrated it in a somewhat gruesome "thought experiment." He imagined a cat in a box that was rigged with a device that would release a poison gas if triggered by a certain kind of radioactive decay. The decay was random, so there was no way to predict whether or not it would go off and trigger the gas. If the box was opaque, there was no way to know whether or not the cat was alive without opening the lid, meaning that the cat could be alive or could be dead, just like the photon or electron could be a wave or could be a particle. To the observer, the cat was both alive and dead at the same time (or neither alive nor dead) until the lid opened. In the same way, the photon or electron is both a wave and a particle until it is measured and its "wave function" collapses.

Reardon uses the same kind of idea to talk about socks. The washer or dryer is a closed system, and there is no way to know if the sock is inside the machine until the door is opened and the laundry is retrieved. Once the door is opened, the sock function collapses, and it becomes a sock or it disappears. Reardon's theory also allows for the possibility that a sock in the dryer becomes lint, because it can't leave the closed system of the washer or dryer. So someone doing a future load of laundry may open the door and find that the sock function has again collapsed, but this time instead of an existing sock disappearing, a previously lost sock has reappeared. Unless, of course, you clean your lint trap and mess up the closed system.

Although I can't put together the equations that would describe it, I would like to propose a corollary to the Schrödinger-Reardon model that actually brings both of them together. As I said, I don't know the math for it, but I have observed it to be true on many occasions. I suggest that, for every unique load of laundry that is brought out of the dryer, there exists the potential of one unique cat which will appear at the center of the warm and dry clothes to take a nap there, whether the cat was visible anywhere near the dryer before the load was removed from it or not.

(H/T The Newton Blog)