Missing socks are socks that have once existed, but can no longer be found. Everyone has had the experience of putting an even number of socks in the dryer and finding that, at the end of the drying cycle, the number is odd. Enlightenment-era Europeans, who believed that there was a logical explanation for everything, had no way to keep an accurate inventory of their socks. As a result, these normally rational people invented the myth of The Place Where the Missing Socks Go, a small parallel universe known as PWMSG for short.