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?
In: 1
In modern physics gravity is understood as a curvature in space-time, not as a force per se. Everything passing through the curved region of space-time will get affected. And that curvature is generated not just by mass but by the so-called stress-energy tensor, which is non-zero even for massless particles like photons. So not only photons are affected by gravity, they also generate their own (very small) gravity.
Latest Answers