Absolutely. In every area of my life where I’ve shown any minor interest, I’ve always cataloged my thought process and assessment of the subject. It’s an incurable curiosity and driving need to deeply understand any subject matter I’m pursuing.

At the moment, I’m digesting Brian Greene’s book, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. It discusses basically everything mentioned in the title, though breaks down complex concepts to relate them to more human experiences, and make the idea of superstring theory more accessible to mainstream audiences.

Also, what spurned my recent curiosity in this subject? I just finished two books by Michael Crichton — one is The Andromeda Strain, and one is The Terminal Man. Both books have a heavy emphasis on the history of the medical and scientific field, and base a lot of the fictional writing on actual scientific fact. After reading these books, I found myself questioning what is real and what isn’t, so to satisfy that curiosity, I decided to read The Elegant Universe. A lot of the concepts expressed in Greene’s book are relevant to Crichton’s novels, and so it builds on what I already know.

Basically, I’m just reading for fun, and reading to answer my basic questions. But I love to speculate wildly and with abandon the core concepts of basically everything. These are the sort of conversations I like to have with people over wine, or while I’m on the phone late at night just talking to friends I haven’t seen in a while who might have the same curiosities as me.

I’m sure that after I don’t need to “learn” about this topic anymore and have grasped a basic concept of the subject matter, I’ll lose the passion I have for pursuing information on it. Once things become very obviously routine for me, I no longer speculate these things with the same passion — it’s the same for our basic grasp of special relativity: We don’t realize how fast things are moving by us because we’re so used to seeing things the way that they are, and so it doesn’t occur to us to speculate on the subject at all.

Also, I just like to have a basic wealth of knowledge to draw from during any sort of conversation, really. I ask questions because I want to know, and I pursue answers because I want to sate my personal curiosities. The only dumb question is the one not asked, right?