Question: Why is dryer lint always gray, even though it comes from clothes of many different colors?
Answer: Lint is not always gray. Check your bellybutton. Bellybutton lint hews to the hue of your shirt.But dryer lint is usually gray because gray is what you get when you mix fibers that are red, yellow, blue, green, black, white, etc. If all your clothes were red, you'd have reddish lint, but since you probably have a multichromatic wardrobe the lint filter tends to be gray. "It's just the combination of bunches of color you see," says Eva Konopacki, supervisor of testing for International Fabric Care Institute.
You can check this by using a "lint roller" on various garments; your gray lint will reveal itself to be individual fibers of different colors.
By the way, we were planning to give up lint for Lent, because we thought it was such a funny concept, but our associates persuaded us to give up jokes.
From The Mailbag
John W., of Gaithersburg, Md., asks, "Why is there anything?"
He explains: "This, I think, was my first experience of the sense of wonder, of awe. I later learned that philosophers ask it this way: Why is there something rather than nothing?"
Johnny, we called up an actual philosopher, Robert Nozick of Harvard, and he said that, yes, he'd handled that one. He was all over it. The answer was in his book, "Philosophical Explanations," he said. We checked it out and found the material to be, um, abstruse.
Rather than be discouraged, we'll just answer the question the best we can, which is to offer one morsel of conjecture: Nothing does not exist because Nothing cannot exist.
The question is prejudiced, you see, in that it presumes that Nothing is a more natural condition than Something, that there is a greater onus to explain Something than there would be to explain Nothing. But is Nothing a natural state? Ask yourself: What does "Nothing" mean? When you imagine Nothing in your head, you probably picture a large, dark void - but would that be Nothing?
Actually it would be something - call it Not Much - because, as you picture it, it has dimensions, including a time dimension. It has a presence. But the pure, unadulterated Nothing should have no characteristics! It would not "exist" in the way that Something exists. And a nonexistent thing couldn't turn into Something.
"If ever nothing was the natural state . . . then something could never have arisen. But there is something. So nothingness is not the natural state; if there is a natural state, it is somethingness," Nozick writes.
What all this implies is that the universe is infinitely old, that it had no beginning.