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 a box labeled TAXES 2017. Now he's thirty-five, teaching physics to nursing students and living, "temporarily," in his childhood bedroom, where he moved after his father died.
Then the biggest solar storm since 1859 paints the Colorado sky green, and by morning there is a moose in the Walmart. A Pomeranian turns up in a refrigerator. A dental receptionist vanishes mid-bite and reappears two booths over. Every living thing is learning to pop from place to place, and to peek into anywhere it pleases. Within two weeks, privacy is over.
The only explanation on Earth is Woody's old thesis, which has turned up on a pirate website between ads for Bitcoin and dating sites. With his lifelong best friend Dirk, whom everyone calls Dork, and his formidable older sister Beatrice, who always knows exactly where he is, Woody is drafted to build the barrier his professors mocked as "Maxwell's Screen Door." But a wall that keeps out strangers also keeps out the people who love you, and the government wants to put one over an entire campus, with his mother inside.
Warm, wry, and grounded in real physics, Maxwell's Screen Door is a comic novel about a kind man, a world that can't stop snooping, and the people who hold us in place, and about the difference between a wall and a door.