Randomly Synchronised Spin

Randomly Synchronised Spin or RSS is the underlying principle of matter transmission.

Theory

There had to be a good reason why socks go missing in the wash and it was up to Milus Blondel to figure out what that reason was. He was the only person in the world in early 2059 who knew for certain that socks did actually go missing (see EMTI) and that when they did go missing they went very missing indeed.

Blondel's theory was based on the fact that socks, unlike any other item of machine-washable clothing spend most of their useful lives being swung in an arc at the end of a leg. This action, he postulated, stored up what he called spin associated disassociation due to the interrupted spin memory of the component atoms of the socks. The act of placing these spin dissociated socks into rapidly rotating and counter-rotating washing machines which then span them at high speed before they were tumbled dried in, yet again rotating drums, meant that the spin memory could be allowed to complete its interrupted motion and that, on rare occasions, internal sock harmony was attained and they became randomly synchronised with a Very Large Receiver somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. In support of this wildly ambitious idea, he pointed out that;

• There is no recorded instance of a sock going missing while being washed by hand.
• Only favourite socks go missing because they are the ones that are the most used and therefore most washed and subsequently more likely to achieve RSS.

Inconsistencies

Why there is a receiver in the Alpha Centauri system that is powerful enough to effect a 4.2 lightyear jump and just happens to be tuned into the unique signature of a synchronised Earth-bound sock is yet to be explained. However RSS theory states that all spin states are possible so in an infinite universe all spin states must therefore exist and the existence of a body that is tuned to this particular synchronicity is a statistical certainty. Perhaps we are fortunate that the sock planet is only just over four lightyears away. If it had been in Mira, Milus would have been dead long before the signals reached Earth and matter transmission might never have been discovered.

The theory, and a lot of largely incomprehensible mathematics has only gone part-way to proving what actually happens. Matter transmitters work. That cannot be denied. But whether they work because the EMTI randomly synchronises the spin of sub-atomic particles or because of some other as-yet-unexplained phenomena is a completely open question.

Ballpoint pen hypothesis

Ballpoint pens themselves are not usually naturally prone to RSS, however, the tiny ball at the tip of the pen is an ideal candidate for random spin synchronisation, especially if the pen's owners are in the habit of twirling the pen in their fingers, or even more recklessly, spinning the pen on a table. The hypothesis is that ballpoint pens only disappear because their balls fall into RSS and take the rest of the pen with them.

While this may seem far fetched, there was no-one who lived in the late 20th and early 21st century who regularly used ballpoints who would deny that these pens could spontaneously disappear within a few seconds of being put down.