Editing EggOfThePhoenix:Lost Physics

The universe is a balance between Lost and Found. If everything is Lost, it's the Void -- game over. If everything's Found, it's Heat Death -- game over again.

On the quantum level, this works pretty well without active supervision. Particles and antiparticles do their little dance, disappearing and appearing wherever they like. On the cosmic level, pretty much the same. You have black holes and quasars, missing matter and dark matter, all in balance to let the game go on for quite a while.

On the human level, though, things can get messed up pretty quick. Humans don't just blindly follow the laws as laid down, they get Involved, and try to change things. Humans have this nasty habit of thinking that having their car keys and being able to go to work are more important than the balance between Void and Entropy. Worse yet, they use logic and memory to figure out where things cannot be, which (barring intervention) means those things are not free to be Found there.

Lost and Found boxes are a compromise. When an object's time as a Lost item is done, it it free to come back to one of those boxes, preventing the possibility of too many objects staying Lost because some poor sod had eliminated any place they could not be, and searched any place they could be, thus establishing that they weren't anywhere.

[Short version: There is a flow of things being Lost, then Found. Those boxes keep the process from getting jammed up.]