Dinosaurs and Socks

Life abounds in mysteries big and small: What can be done for a bad back? How do socks disappear inside a washing machine? Why does anyone still listen to economists? Will the universe stop expanding and collapse? What happened to the dinosaurs?

In recent years this last question has been the subject of much head-scratching that has led to the development of the Nemesis theory. You remember the Nemesis theory: It’s the one that says that our sun has a companion star (called Nemesis) whose orbit periodically takes it through the Oort cloud that is thought to girdle the solar system, where it dislodges scads of comets--some of which come hurtling toward the Earth. A few of the comets hit the planet, kicking up dust and debris and creating a non-nuclear winter that shuts out light, kills food and causes the mass extinction of animals. The dinosaurs, according to this theory, perished in one of these mass extinctions that occur every 26 million years or so, according to one calculation, or every 30 million years, according to another.

Now comes some disturbing news for supporters of this theory. Researchers have discovered a large cache of dinosaur bones above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, indicating that dinosaurs could survive very well in months of cold and darkness, thank you. (Why did they have to wait for the bones, by the way? Prudhoe Bay, not far from the fossil find, is North America’s largest oil deposit, and some people think that oil comes from dinosaurs.)

In addition, statistical work reported in several journals recently casts doubt on the neat regularity of the mass extinctions. Needless to say, it’s hard to pinpoint fossil records with great accuracy in geological time, and certain assumptions must be made. If certain other equally plausible assumptions are made, the 26-million-year or 30-million-year cycle of extinctions disappears.

Don’t get us wrong. Science is a process of finding things out, and the process can be more interesting than the results. It’s in the nature of inquiry for theories to be proposed, revised, altered, massaged, discarded or left in limbo, supported by some facts but not proved. Nemesis appears to be such a theory.

Now, about those missing socks . . .