bobby's socks

When I was growing up, we had a basket for all the newly-laundered socks which had come through the process with no mates. Most were white, some with stripes, some plain, all lone.
Once in a great while, a match would be found between one in the basket and a new sock straight from the dryer.
Once in a very great while.
Mostly, the lone socks became dust cloths.

My friend Lorrie posted this photo a couple of days ago and I stole it. (Hey, I told her I was going to do so, okay?)
I was impressed that she had
1) managed to amass such a collection of her husband's dress socks, and
2) bothered to take a photograph of them.
What does happen in the laundry room to those lost socks?

Perhaps they wander off to a parallel universe inhabited by one-legged creatures. In that case, the socks may well have been deliberately kidnapped.
No, that wouldn't be right.
Kidnappers want ransom or something in return.
With rare exceptions, the socks are taken and never returned. There isn't even an option provided for securing their passage back to their rightful owners.
They are simply gone.

Perhaps socks become sentient and take refuge under the washer or dryer.
When the warm and moist environment of most shoes is combined with the discarded genetic material from sloughed skin cells and attendant fungi, you have to grant that the creation of a new life form is a possibility.
I didn't say it was a good possibility, just that it should be taken into consideration.
If life forms can exist inside volcanoes and within frozen tundra, then why not in a warm enclosure such as a shoe?

Perhaps the lost socks disintegrate during the washing process. Quality control cannot be expected to catch every sock with an irregularity, right?
During the vigorous wash cycle, the cohesive bonds between the molecules within the fibers may be irretrievably broken, causing the molecules to go skittering down the drain with the rinse water.
I can absolutely see that happening!
Perhaps further testing is needed.

Any volunteers for those experiments?
We would need to use men's socks or children's socks.
Why?
With few exceptions, those are the only types of socks which disappear.
Seriously.
We could use a collection of women's socks as our control.

Feel free to conduct your own studies of the matter. I will be very interested in your results, truly I will.
Truly!