The Mess Is The Message

I was once a university student, and I write from first-hand experience. As any university student will confirm, it takes work to wash and dry socks, sort them, fold them and put them in the dresser drawer. Furthermore, socks, left to their own devices, will disappear from the dresser drawer and distribute themselves under the bed, on the bathroom floor and hanging over a lampshade. If you catch university students unawares on a cloudy morning, you will rarely find them washing and sorting socks, and frequently find them spontaneously sniffing socks to see if they will serve for another day. On a sunny day, it may be otherwise; they go without socks. We might surmise that, were the sun to stop shining, life on earth would end with socks randomly disbursed in shopping malls, pubs, and hanging from street signs. Or in a final burst of energy like a star collapsing into a black hole, they might go home to mother.

I offer the preceding analysis as evidence that physics explains everything; well, everything but mathematics, which explains physics. Nothing explains mathematics. So there's no math in this message. It's about the mess.