Was having a great conversation with a friend when I brought up how light could have force but not mass.
The conversation started with how we could not observe electron states due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and then my friend told me that we tried using a massless particle in order to observe the positions and velocities of an electron to no avail, they interacted with the electron during observation. That got me thinking that that light might have mass. It’s proven that black holes emit such strong gravity that even light cannot escape its pull, but for something to be influenced by the pull of gravity it has to have mass doesn’t it? F must equal m and a in Newtonian physics. So doesn’t that mean that light has mass, but just not any mass observable by current technology?
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You’re approaching this from a newtonian mechanics standpoint. This gets real tricky real fast when talking about light.
Light has momentum. While Newton would tell you that momentum requires mass, Newton would be wrong. With normal mass, at low speeds, Newtonian momentum is *approximately* accurate. At high speeds, which light obviously travels at, things get a bit more complicated. In the vase of light, its momentum comes from its energy.
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Black holes do not pull on mass. Black holes bend spacetime, and this can cause mass to curve but it also means that when light follows a locally straight line, that line can appear to not be straight to a more distant observer.
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