I don’t get it. C, that is. The speed of light.

I get that it’s supposed to be constant, and I get that the idea enables us to have GPS and all kinds of other wonderments, and I don’t even wonder why, since the universe gets to have any rules it wants, as far as I’m concerned. I just don’t get what it means that the speed of light is constant. Not light itself, mind you, but its speed. An attribute trumps the thing it’s attached to.

When you’re talking about speed, the first question that pops up is, relative to what? With light, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same regardless of what it’s measured against. If I’m standing still, and you’re moving, we will still get the same reading on our cosmic radar guns. As if that weren’t enough boggle for one topic, yours would arrive a little bluer or redder than mine, because, of course, the frequency, which I would have thought had some relation to speed, is not constant.

What exactly was Einstein on about when he was talking about the speed of light? Clearly, velocity, almost by definition, is what relates time to space, so I get why it should have a central place in a theory that regards space-time as a continuum. But velocity is an attribute, dammit! It has no existence outside of the thing it is a characteristic of. How can it possibly be the root phenomenon of reality as we know it?

Then again, I still don’t understand airline pricing, so maybe such things are just beyond my grasp.