I returned home late-ish this evening to find lying on the floor near my computer a food item which I swear I did not bring into my apartment in my 2+ years of living here. It was about the size and shape of a cookie (maybe a little bigger than a chips ahoy) and it crumbled like a cookie, but it also had the look of a very old dim sum item, like a piece of pastry folded over with some sort of filling.
There are very few plausible explanations as to how this mysterious food item came to be sitting on my floor. It’s somewhat disheartening that the *best* I can hope for is that it has to do with a rodent. I don’t want to think of the other possibility, namely, that a human was in my apartment, brazenly leaving the cookie as their calling card. But.. what else could it be??
For some reason a fact from Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World” popped into my head. I actually managed to find the relevant passage pretty quickly, surprisingly, since it’s been years since I’ve read the book. According to Sagan, “Once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street.” Apparently this has to do with a consequence of quantum mechanics called “barrier tunneling.” He adds in a footnote, “The average waiting time per stochastic ooze is much longer than the age of the Universe since the Big Bang. But, however improbable, in principle it might happen tomorrow.” So I suppose that would be explanation number three for the cookie.
Anyway, I just wanted to send this out to the world in case I am carried off by large rodents, or spirited away by kidnappers who are careless with their cookies, or transported to another spot in the universe due to stochastic hyperactivity. Just remember.. The Cookie is the Clue.
