Some claimed that light had a consciousness and personality and could even be chatted with, often revealing its deeper secrets to those who approached it in the right way.
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"Some"
This line convinced me Pynchon's "some" are the ones rounded up in the asylum which makes sense because this is the same paragraph that began explaining what the cop meant by "Newburgh."
While this line sounds like Pynchon is describing some woo woo séance hoodoo mumbo jumbo, a less cynical reading could simply see it as a way of describing what scientists do. Obviously they don't think light has a consciousness and a personality and is eager for a quick chat over a nice tea. But it does have, as a stand-in for those things, intrinsic properties which can only be learned via controlled experiments and careful observations (or chats!). The Michelson-Morley experiment itself is one of these chats trying to get light to reveal one specific secret dealing with how it travels through a vacuum as a wave. Light will have nothing to say on the matter of Æther which will be a statement of a kind anyway, leading to further discoveries once scientists have decided that the inclusion of Æther in the movement of light is a dead end.
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