May/June 2008

Warrior-poet and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once deployed his particular brand of obtuse poetry to define the many kinds of knowledge. There are “known knowns,” the things we think we’ve got a handle on. There are “unknown unknowns,” ideas or phenomena we’ve never even thought to investigate. And let us not forget the “known unknowns”—information we know is out there but have not yet discovered.

Scientists wrestle with the last kind and in the process uncover the questions people never thought to ask.

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Back in 2006, astronomers kicked out the scrawniest member of our solar system’s nine-planet fraternity—Pluto. Though they demoted it to “dwarf planet” status, scientists quickly redeemed the object by proclaiming it one of the largest bodies in another selective society—the Kuiper Belt, a motley crew of icy stragglers left behind when the Sun and planets formed.

Astronomers believe that roughly 4.5 billion years ago, a giant cloud of gas and dust began spinning in space.
Gravity pulled much of this swirling mass toward the center, which then spun faster, similar to the way ice skaters twirl more quickly by drawing their arms closer to their body. When the core became dense enough and hot enough to generate nuclear reactions, it evolved into a star—the Sun.

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Dr. George W. Morse
Photo Courtesy of
the MIT Museum

He launched the plan from his Boston office, a medical clinic open just two hours daily. It was July 31, 1920, and Dr. George W. Morse sought to expand his practice across the Charles River to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a four-page letter to MIT’s Executive Committee, Morse detailed his vision of a campus medical department, complete with its own offices, an initial budget of $8,520, and a lofty goal: “to give free consultation, treatment, and medical advice to all members of the student body, faculty, instructing staff, and employees of the Institute.”

Morse readily received approval, but with a reduced budget of $7,000, achieved by lowering his proposed salary. It was still enough, though, to purchase surgical supplies, employ an assistant, and hire six doctors to help perform the mandatory physical exams.

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Cupertino, California. The year is 1990. Jim Reekes, still on the boyish cusp of thirty, is in his tiny recording studio at home, his hands darting about a Korg Wavestation synthesizer. Reekes is an audio engineer working on Apple’s latest machine, the Quadra 700. By day, he develops the audio software that goes on powerful new chips. Tonight, he’s on a secret mission of his own: to make a new startup sound for the Quadra.

In 1990, the Macintosh IIs on the market play what Reekes thinks is an absolutely horrible chord, a screeching, cacophonic, flat-out awful beep. The machines do this as a sort of infant’s first yawp, to let the world know they have woken up and are alive (this is before processing power could support a startup screen).

The chord Reekes hates, composed from a mathematical algorithm by a dude named Mark Lentzer, is based entirely on tritones. Lentzer thinks the whole music-from-math thing—not a synth or keyboard in sight, unless it’s a computer keyboard—is cool. It’s not cool. For centuries, the tritone—so named because it spans three whole tones, such as a diminished fifth or augmented fourth like C to F sharp—was known as the Devil’s Interval for its dissonance. Medieval churches forbade the playing of tritones, and classic movies used it to denote evil, such as when the killer rounds a corner with a knife or the bad guy in the black Stetson walks into the bar.

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It is a marvelous piece of luck that I am not in any way related to my friend Dean. If his family had gone back just a generation or two more in rural Delaware County, New York, we’d be cousins six ways from Sunday. When you’re going through your address book for a father for your baby, these things matter.

About a year ago, four of us—me, my girlfriend Julia, Dean, and his girlfriend Sarah—sat down at a big farmhouse table with a couple of legal documents and hammered out the details of what we were about to embark on. Six months ago, all our work paid off. I got pregnant.

Clearly, it would have been easier on everybody if I had just ordered anonymous sperm off the Internet, like a sensible person. And I’m sure the chemists at Cryogenic Laboratories would have mixed me up a fine baby. But when it came right down to it, the prospect of calling up a sperm bank and ordering a shot of Donor No. 3924 triggered a nasty bout of what bioethicists call the “ick factor.” I wanted to know who my baby’s father was.

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