What really is a particle? How can massless particles exist? How can it still be a particle if it doesn’t have any mass?
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What is a particle: Nobody knows. Unraveling a particle unleashes a lot of energy, so it can be viewed in many ways as a ‘knot’ in space that gets ‘unraveled’ given the right conditions. I say space because we technically don’t know if the fields in space are a part of it or not.
How can massless particles exist: They technically can’t if they interact with the higgs field in some way, and I believe most all particles interact with it. What does it mean that they interact? we’re back in dubious territory where we don’t know the specifics, see the knot metaphor.
Light is technically massless, but light is technically a wave in the electro-magnetic field and not specifically a particle so it has momentum energy that it can give to real particles from interacting with them (different interaction than before)
How can it still be a particle if it doesn’t have any mass: it depends on your viewpoint. Let’s say you see a wave on the ocean. You can’t really say that the wave is a particle, right? But you can pin-point a specific part of the wave and see that there was a specific drop of the ocean that was a part of the wave. So is that particle a particle of the wave? No.. but when you’re modeling things, because our mathematical models are quite crude, it’s a bit simpler for us to use models that work exceptionally well with particles.
This means that our models guide our thought on what is or isn’t a particle, and not physical reality.
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