Here's a possibly impertinent question.

Rand Simberg has a post on the proposition that Einstein was right in his prediction that the "speed" of gravity and the speed of light are the same. Or, at least, according to a recent study, they are within 20 % of each other.

My question is, why?

Why is light the absolute speed limit of the universe?

I get the feeling that the answer to this one is that I am going to be told this is somehow a meaningless question, like what existed before the Big Bang. Or what exists outside the expanding wave front of the universe.

My next question is, how did Einstein pick photons as the objects that travelled the fastest of all objects in the universe? Was this a lucky guess on his part?

Based on my college experience of hanging out with political science majors, I get the feeling that the answers are not going to come from the conservative, Catholic or lawyer lobes of this site. Hopefully, some physicist will stumble onto this site in search of porn.

Update While I'm waiting for that physicist (as if they can't get enough action simply by flashing their degrees at the local bar), I have gotten some great answers to my questions.

As set forth in the comments, according to Mr. Muncey, Einstein perceived that light and photons were moving at some kind of absolute speed because there was no observable difference in their speed if one moved toward them or away from them. That does spark some long term physics memory. Of coure, there is a doppler shift phenomena with respect to frequency, which is one of the empirical supports for the Big Bang. David provided some links to sites which said (a) don't ask stupid questions about why natural phenomena are the way they are and (b) photons can move at the speed of light because they are massless (or really, really light) and so don't suck all the energy out of the universe when they go really, really fast. (Because mass increases asymptopically at light speed.) So, I guess, photons travel at light speed because they can. My next question is do photons go that fast because of something internal to themselves or do they get accelerated that fast by an outside source.

So, I'm still waiting for that physicist in search of lava hot rabbit love involving naughty college coeds. [There, that should bait the trap.]