Maxwell's Screen Door

Everything is somewhere. The question is why it stays there.
For most of his life, Elwood "Woody" Maxwell has been asking a question nobody else bothers with: why do things stay where they are?
As a gangly teenager, he asked it in his bedroom, beside a slice of pie that was slowly becoming an ecosystem. As a graduate student, he answered it, in a doctoral thesis so far ahead of its time that his committee passed him only after he agreed to cut the final chapter. Then he put the whole thing in...