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Why? Meaning, one day when I will go up into Heaven and face the tribunal, the celestial tribunal presided over by God himself, and he will try to ask me questions. Why didn't you do that properly? I will answer only with one word. Why? Just why. Why did it happen? Politically, we know, but theologically, we don't know. We will never know. Whatever the answer will be, I will not accept it. It comes to that period, to that tremendous event, I don't accept answers. Only questions. The greatest scholar, the saintliest person would come to me to say, "Look, I found the answer."  I would say, "Good for you, but not good for me."

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Being an oceanographer, the big picture is that the ocean provides more than half the oxygen that we breathe. Is it going to be there in two hundred years? What about sea-level rise along the coast? When I think about the Gulf Coast, there is the BP oil spill, there is Katrina. But there is also the rising sea level, and the Gulf Coast itself is sinking. So you've got water rising and land sinking. As an oceanographer, I think long-term, so the things that keep me up at night are mostly decade or century types of things.

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Well, there are a lot of questions that keep me up at night. Big or small depends on context. I want to be able to meet my payroll at the end of the month, and keep this kind of search going as a scientific exploration for the decades or centuries that might need to transpire before we get smart enough to do the right thing to be able to find the answer. And I don't actually have a good model of how you would continue this scientific exploration over the generations.

Universities have done endowments. That's worked fairly well for them. That might be where this kind of scientific inquiry has to look for its funding model. But that's my big question is how do I, how do I not only do my job as well as I can, maybe find the answer myself, but how do I set this up so that my successor can continue to perhaps success at some point?

I find it extraordinarily disturbing when science is questioned -- good science, science that is undeniably sound, such as global climate change, global warming. It's real and there is a human component to that. To have people who don't really have the credentials to just decide they don't believe it -- that's really insomnia-making. To live in a society where we need to make incredibly technical decisions about our future, we need to develop technologies to solve some of the problems that previous generations of technology have created. To have people say, "Nah, I don't believe it," that's not the way to move forward. And I also worry at night about the fact that there are just too many of us, and we need to face that right directly straight on. Because if we don't get that one right, we'll not get anything right.

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Doesn't everyone have such questions? I have no idea why I'm here. I have no idea what all this is and how it came to be and where I'm going. And those are huge questions. I've always been fascinated about the relationship between what's in here and what's out there. And I've always felt that we're not simply passive observers or passive recorders -- that somehow consciousness interacts with what's ever out there in a very dynamic shaping way.

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The big questions that keep me up at night -- how did the universe begin? Is it chance? Necessity? Purpose? Is there any meaning to our existence? What does it mean to be human? Is a divine intelligence behind the appearance of space, time, energy, information, matter, gravity, whatever? Do we have a soul? If so, what is it? What happens to us after we die? What's the next stage of evolution of the human species?

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Well, there are many questions that keep me up at night. Since 9/11 -- I mean, I think I slept pretty well, I don't sleep a lot, but I think I slept pretty well up until 9/11. And yesterday, on the 10th anniversary -- we're talking on 9/12, right now, 2011 -- since 9/11, a lot of worries started. And I'm an optimist. I love to be optimistic about everything, and yet, so many things have occurred since 9/11 that keep me up: worry about politics, worry about the growth of our country, worry about what's really happening in the rest of the world, worry about what are we doing for the youth of tomorrow, the next generations. And then, on top of that, my daughter just gave birth to a new child, my first grandchild, and I want to be optimistic for her. I want things to be better; I want things to be happy. I want our lives to be extraordinary, the way I grew up, just with every opportunity available. That's what keeps me awake at night.

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The big questions that keep me up at night, the ones I'm most curious about is, "How does it how all end? What happens to me when my heart stops beating, my lungs stop ventilating, my kidneys stop diuresing, and my liver stops detoxifying? Does it just turn black? Do I just slate out? Or is there something else that's going to go on in my life?"

I've asked my patients who've been as close to death as you can get, whose fingers barely grasped the ledge into the abyss of death as they crawled their way back into a natural existence: "What was it like? What did it look like down there?" And I've had lots of folks recount out-of-body experiences and visions of what it might look like, but we won't know. We all will one day, but we don't know right now.

I'm also curious about how it all started. I've always been fascinated by astronomy and the Big Bang, and what was there before that, because that may hold the clue to what's going on after we're done with this game. But of course I've been advised by numerous wise folk to not spend too much time with those big questions because it can drive you crazy. And so I try to focus my curiosity on one fundamental issue: How do I get past that external, crusty veneer that we perceive as reality into the deeper depth of what is truly going on in our existence?

Going beneath that surface is I think what most of us seek. It's what meditation promises to afford us; it's what some of us experience during sex, when we have an epiphany, learning a new insight. We also appreciate the deep well of calmness in our world that we know is there -- we just have trouble getting to it. I think it is the biggest challenge of modern society. When the world was slower and there was less to distract you from that fundamental search for wisdom, it was sometimes easier to focus on it, but now it's like walking into a restaurant with hundreds of wines on the list, and you're not very good at wine or picking it out, and it gets pretty confusing. It's daunting.

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There are two kinds of big questions that keep me up at night: the ones that are answerable and the ones that aren't. The answerable questions that keep me up are what I do in my day job: How am I going to make that water machine? How am I going to make it simple and reliable and robust? And how am I going to make it available to 4 billion people -- two-thirds of humanity -- that right now are suffering without water? How am I going to convince a whole generation of kids in this country that working hard and understanding math and physics and science and engineering is going to lead them to a far more exciting and productive life than bouncing a ball will ever do, in terms of giving them future options?

The big questions to me that relate to my day job are, again, trying to match technologies to problems in a way to raise the bar and the quality of life of people. The big questions in the other category, now: Why is there a universe? How did we get here? What was it like before the beginning? What will it be like after the end? And even simpler unanswerables: Why are so many people more interested in putting more effort into hurting other people than helping themselves? There are lots of those questions that I don't anticipate I will ever answer or even maybe fully understand as a question. But they sometimes keep me up at night.