Big Mike: Why, Why, Why?

The dining room opens up into the living room in our new joint so The Loved One and I, although we don’t share the same evening pastimes, can still pretty much be together as we do our separate things. Last night, she was laying on the sofa clicking through the channels as I sat at the dining room table, my laptop open in front of me, quipping and barbing via IM with my pals Anna in LA and Tim in Chi as I read the day’s news.

The Loved One found something compelling, a program about quasars. Now we might not share terribly many interests but the Universe is one. We’re both suckers for talk about the vastness and inscrutability of, well, out there. Out of the corner of my ear I could hear the voiceover guy say the farthest known quasar is about nine billion light years away. Not even our Prius with a full tank of gas could make that trip.

Toward the end of the program, the voiceover guy came to the conclusion that we may never know precisely what quasars are all about. Suddenly, The Loved One spoke.

She: “What’s the use?”

Me: “Duh, what?”

She: “What’s the use? Why should we even waste our time trying find out about these things?”

Now, The Loved One wasn’t pooh-poohing the idea of inquiry. I know her enough to realize she’s hungry for answers. But my guess is she was doing a quick cost-benefit analysis in her head. She probably figured if we can’t get to the bottom of these quasars in our lifetimes, our grandchildren’s lifetimes or even the lifetimes of the civilizations of the 42nd Century, why not focus our resources on another mystery, like AIDS, cancer or why people listen to Glenn Beck?

I offered a simple response.

Me: “Because we want to know.”

She: “But we’ll never know.”

Me: “That’s fine. Then we’ll always have something to aim for.”

The Loved One is a practical soul so, even though she fell silent, I knew she was stewing over the thousands of years of research we’re going to do on quasars without a payoff. I’m the dreamer. I’ve never cared about a payoff.

I’d be a terrible businessperson. The Loved One is the soberest domestic entrepreneur I know. While she studies the different types of new tires we should put on our car or seeks the best weatherstripping we should apply around our door frames, I’m musing about the buzzing, quivering, excruciatingly minute world that lies beneath, well, everything.

When I was about seven, I got the big serrated knife out of the drawer to cut a slice of bread. I’d been under strict orders never to use that knife but, naturally, I ignored them. Just as naturally, I opened up the tip of my thumb like a ripe peach. While my mother was simultaneously yelling “I told you!” and bandaging my wound, I pondered the cutting I’d just done.

This was about the time I’d learned that the most cutting edge (pun intended) science was that of splitting the atom. I thought, “What’s the big deal? Didn’t I just split about a million atoms when I cut into the loaf of bread (as well as my precious flesh)?”

This conundrum spurred me to look into the atomic universe as much as any non-math, non-physics guy could. I don’t know all the formulas but I do know now that the stuff of existence, what we see and feel, is made of successively tinier building blocks, so much so that atoms are actually super-huge structures when compared to some of the sub-atomic particles discovered at places like Fermilab and CERN. The physical world is nothing more than a grand, infinite Russian nesting doll. Who knows? Maybe the top quark, which the Fermilab gang announced they’d seen in 1995, is comprised of billions or trillions of smaller pieces.

I need to know what those pieces are. Not that I’m going to find any of them, mind you. But I’ll be watching for all the math and physics geeks to do so.

My late sis, Good Old Franny, used to scold me: “You always have to ask why or how. You’re too analytical.” Franny never cared to look into things too deeply. She loved her illusions — she was a sucker for Miss America pageants and she believed politicians were noble souls with high ideals. She was shocked whenever a senator was caught with his pants down. I told her politicians always have their pants down; it’s in their nature. I know because I was driven to ask the how and the why of their makeup. Franny would put her thumb to her nose and wiggle her fingers at me.

Invariably, Franny would say to me, “You ask why like a two-year-old.” She meant it as a harsh criticism. I took it as a compliment.

The Loved One doesn’t criticize that part of me. Much. Still, she has to wonder what the knowledge of the top quark or the nature of quasars have to do with what kind of tires we should put on our car. I figure we balance each other nicely.