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One of the benefits of having smart friends is that it makes me smarter, too.

I mean, I only know what I already know, so I need other people to teach me things I don’t know.

Fortunately, I have lots of smart friends, and even better, they are all smart in different ways.

There is a friend who is really smart about history — local, national and beyond — and she helps me put current events in perspective.

I have a friend who knows everything worth knowing about writing, and she challenges me to find the perfect word with the precise nuance to communicate exactly what I want to say.

Other friends know a lot about art, spirituality, woodworking, traveling, antiques and useless but interesting trivia. I love spending time and talking with these friends, and especially appreciate the way they pretend I bring something of value to the conversation.

Some of them have to pretend more than others, but nobody has to pretend more than my friend the astrophysicist.

He tells me all about his latest research and the scholarly papers he is publishing.

I have absolutely zero knowledge about these things but somehow, he is able to make me understand the mysteries of the universe, even if only a little bit.

And because the universe is really, really big (even I know that), I give myself credit that even a little bit of knowledge is pretty impressive.

He listens with patience and good humor when I suggest my own theories, and sometimes he even says my ideas have potential. After all, I am not constrained by information or facts, so imagination and wild guesses are all on the table.

Like the other day, for example. He was telling me about dark matter, which — who knew? — has been proven to exist, but there is a certain property about it called WIMP, which stands for “weakly interacting massive particles.”

The details are complicated and boring but it’s something about how dark matter moves through things — apparently, including people — without being detected.

Anyway, he was going on and on about how scientists are trying to solve this problem, which apparently is a big deal.

I dipped a chicken nugget in ranch dressing and snorted. “Well, that’s easy,” I said.

My friend never laughs at me, but I am pretty sure I saw a smile this time.

“It’s because dark matter moves at another frequency,” I said. “If you can either slow your detection instruments down or speed them up, you’ll find it.”

Sometimes I am so smart, even my smart friends can’t keep up with me.

“Maybe,” I said, feeling smarter by the minute, “maybe dark matter is how certain diseases happen. Like, you know how you said dark matter is moving through us and around us all the time? Maybe sometimes when it bumps into certain cells in certain people in just the right way, it causes the cells to mutate and then it manifests itself as a disease. And maybe, if we could figure this out and harness its energy, we could use the same principle to find cures for these diseases.”

Sometimes I am so smart, even my smartest friends don’t even know how to respond to me.

There was more to this conversation — something about the known substances being liquid, solid, gas and plasma, to which I suggested that maybe dark matter is comprised of an unknown substance — but by now, I could sense I was losing my audience so I changed the subject to something a little easier: How you always either run out of ranch dressing or have too much left when the chicken nuggets are all gone.

If scientists want to work on something that really makes a difference in our everyday lives, they could start with figuring out the correct balance of ranch dressing ounces vs. the number of nuggets.

Even I am not that smart.

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