Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This started as a Facebook comment last night, when I was asked why a friend keeps finding loose cables in her home after having carefully bundled all the spare cables into a designated box. This is how I get when I'm sleepy.

---

You know about quantum states and USB cables, right? (I.e., how a USB plug can be in any of three orientations, right side up, upside down, and indeterminate, and sometimes you have to try three times to plug it in, in order to get the indeterminate superposition to collapse to right-side-up.) What you're experiencing now is a side effect or related effect, which generalizes beyond UCB. Even though you put them all in the box, their actual location remains a probability distribution, so there's always some chance they'll be found outside the box, like an electron. This is the flip side of the well observed phenomenon called "How can it not be in here now that I need it? I know I put it in here, dammit."

Finally, because cables are of the "wire" class of matter, like thin metal coathangers, you can also never be sure how many you own at any given time, and given the right environments they will "breed", in that certain cable-presence densities cause a region of space to spontaneously emit a cable and an anti-cable (which sometimes takes the form of either a wire twistie or a hair-elastic). This is why it's better to store coiled cables in zip-seal baggies instead of binding their loops with twisties: there is always a chance that the cable / twistie pair will annihilate each other in between the last time you saw the cable and the next time you need it.

All very straightforward QM, you see. Unlike the behaviour of guitar picks, which is much more complex and not yet fully understood.