Light strikes me as being too fast to be measured. How do we know that it really travels at 186,000 miles per second? Exactly where are the markers for this measurement? It's not as if there's this big race track in the sky with this teeny little guy waving a checkered flag and tooting a silver whistle and it's all ready-set-go Light on the inside track and neutrinos coming down the middle and muons and other decrepit, decaying particles trundling along without a chance in hell off beating good ol' Speedy.

In my ongoing struggle come to grips with gravity I occasionally find myself pouring over yet another populist physics book. The frequency with which light is used to illuminate one scientific principle or another is astonishing. It appears that the entire body of modern physics is entirely dependent on light. And not just light qua light, but light as a constant. Light as an invariant thing. Light as substance which can be measured.

I have greater difficulty with the light stuff than I do with the far more nonintuitive things like the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty. And even though it seems somehow crazy that if you're a quantum particle you will never know where you are and how fast you're going at the same time, I have to admit that fundamentally it resonates more strongly with me. For one thing I'm reminded of driving in Los Angeles: whizzing along the freeway, dead of night, trying to get back, clocking 85 on the freeway, never knowing quite where I am...

I've been trying to absorb this information for ages but I'm invariably transfixed by this whole light thing. Not just the mystery of its speed but also how is it that we know for certain that nothing is faster than light? As far as I can tell the matter-equals-energy-cum-light equation seems solid only because light is assumed not only to be constant -- which I will reluctantly grant -- but to be the fastest constant -- of which I have yet to be convinced.

Conceptually I find it disquieting that so much of scientific reality rests on something as immaterial as light. That the properties of light should be providing anything with a solid foundation is tangibly paradoxical. Clearly it's more quixotic than the other physical phenomenon of my world. Where is light located? Where does it start? Show me the edge between the flame and the light. From my perspective light is insubstantial. Certainly it seems to have far less sensible impact on my body than, say, the corner of my desk.

Bowling is odd because for whatever reason almost everyone is willing to bowl. Some people will play because they get to wear funny shoes. Some people are intrigued by the low-brow cultural angle. Other people simply want to keep score with those tiny, truncated pencils. I just like the way it sounds.