Our understanding of the speed of light and many other things is predicated on the fact that light has no mass. As we can’t weight it directly like on a scale I am wondering (outside of mathematics) how we can test and prove this theory? Is it possible that light does have mass, it is just very very very small?
Further, if light has no mass, does it also have no energy? e=mc2 means energy for something massless would be 0. We know light has energy, so how does this equation work?
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None of these are actually eli5. The answers I am reading is that the math says so, and special relatively and everything associated with it works.
We have tested time and time again many aspects of special relatively and proven it appears right (at large scales), bit to my knowledge we haven’t actually tested the fact that photons have no mass. Actual tests. Can anyone point to experiments specifically to test this assumption all of special relatively seems to hinge on? An ELI5 breakdown would be great.
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