How can a photon not have mass?
Just like a photon is described by its energy and the fact that it can transfer energy, it is also described as a particle with no mass. It can pass freely through matter without being absorbed or deflected. A particle with no mass cannot be accelerated forward; it will always stay at the same speed.
How can a photon have no mass?
A photon is known to be an elementary particle, i.e., a particle that is made of only the four known building blocks of matter – the quarks and gluons, which are the constituents of the proton and neutron.These pointlike particles, which form the basis of all matter in the Universe, are essentially massless. The photon is an example of a massless particle, known as a gauge boson. This means that when the photon participates in the interaction of two elementary
How can a photon have zero mass?
The photon is an elementary particle that has no properties other than its mass, spin and electric charge. It is the particle of light. Its mass is zero. So, how can a photon not have mass? This can be asked in two ways. Firstly, what is mass? And secondly, how can a particle have no mass?
How to a photon have zero mass?
If a photon mass is possible, it must be the same as the mass of the photon particle, which is zero. One way to imagine the photon particle is as a massless ball of pure energy. If the photon is to have any mass, then the energy of the photon particle would have to be a sum of the energy of the photons that make it up. This idea of the photon particle being a ball of pure energy is not entirely correct. A photon particle would still have to be made
Why can't photons have mass?
The photon is a massless particle. Before the particle was discovered in the early 1900s, physicists had no idea about the existence of such a particle. The concept of the photon was introduced in 1905 by the Russian physicist and mathematician, Alexander S. Einstein. He proposed that an “infinite” amount of energy could be stored in a single particle, which he called the photon. A photon is a particle of light which is associated with one of the four forces of nature: the electromagnetic