If you have ever taken a firearm apart for cleaning or tried to assemble your own AR lower, you have had a part or two that flew off and was damn near impossible to find. We have all experienced it at some time or another.
Today, I read the best explanation as to why these small parts like a detent pin and detent spring are impossible to find after being launched into near space from your kitchen table or workbench. It has nothing to with their size but everything to do with Einsteinian physics.
The reason those parts that go flying are almost never found – because a
spring is causing the flying, they accelerate rapidly. In fact they reach
a very high speed, almost the speed of light. At the speed of light, time
shifting starts to occur. So those parts are time traveling. Sometime the
parts aren’t there yet when you look for them. Maybe try next week…Brian in MI
Time traveling parts. Well that explains it. I guess I need to move my thought processes beyond that of Newtonian physics.
It's not only springs, it works for screws and other hardware. They go into a superposed quantum state and can't be found until we catch up to them. How many times have you found a dropped screw exactly where you've looked a dozen times already? It was in the parallel universe until the time slipped enough for it to reappear in ours.
Some years ago, I had to take down one of my antennas for a hurricane and dropped a wing nut. It should have dropped straight down to the base. It wasn't there. I looked for a long time and never found it. Fast forward a few years to the next hurricane and it was exactly where it should have been and exactly where I looked for 20 minutes the day I dropped it. It could be the wing nut went only a matter of hours into the future or it could have been in a parallel universe for years; I'll never know, but I think it went years into the future. I had worked around that spot many times and never seen it.
I had a detent pin go into a quantum state yesterday. I found it today. I think you are on to something about the parallel universe. Fortunately, mine only lasted about 12 hours.