Question:
Do photons have mass?
♥weasley is my king♥
2010-07-22 09:50:20 UTC
Shouldn't photon's have mass since it has particle character? Will it be less than or more than the mass of an electron?
Seven answers:
MathMan
2010-07-22 09:53:13 UTC
Contrary to popular belief, photons DO have mass. The problem with measuring it is that it is unbelievably small; photons are the least massive things we know today, besides things that have 0 mass, of course.
Lola F
2010-07-22 17:22:35 UTC
Gintable's answer is unfortunately an excellent example for why the concept of "Relativistic Mass" should never be used, and in fact is never used by actual scientists. Unfortunately, the concept survives in elementary textbooks and programs on the science channel because some deluded physics teachers think that it makes learning Relativity easier. But what it actually does is give the student a false, semi-Newtonian misunderstanding of the theory.



Radiation pressure is not evidence that light has mass: it's evidence that light possesses momentum. What a poor physics instructor will do at that point is then say, "...and Newton shows us that momentum is mass times velocity, so if the photon has momentum, then it must have mass." But the problem is that SR is a *replacement* for Newton's Three Laws, which are not correct at speeds near that of light. So no appeal to Newtonian physics is EVER permitted in Relativity, and that line of argumentation is void. What a Relativist says is: "There exists a quantity, the 4-momentum, that transforms as a vector under Lorentz transformations. This quantity's components turn out to be the observed energy and momentum of the particle, and its norm is the mass. Since a photon's energy and momentum are equal, and the norm is m^2=E^2-p^2, the particle has no mass."



A PHOTON HAS NO MASS. When a physicist says "Mass," they mean "Rest Mass," because "Relativistic Mass" stopped being used in physics in 1935.



Gravitational bending of light is not evidence for mass. Only Newtonian gravity describes gravity as the interaction between masses; General relativity does not. It turns out that Newton was wrong about that; his theory of gravity is a good approximation to GR, the correct theory, but it is wrong. Gravity turns out not to be the attraction of masses, but the bending of spacetime, and the source of the bending of spacetime is energy, momentum, flux, pressure, and stress, NOT mass. Once the curvature is produced, all bodies, regardless of their mass, follow the curvature, even if the mass is zero.



A PHOTON HAS NO MASS. When a physicist says "Mass," they mean "Rest Mass," because "Relativistic Mass" stopped being used in physics in 1935.



"Relativistic Mass", meaning, the mass you get when you naively plug in energy into E=mc^2, rather than into the correct equation, E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2, is meaningless. It is NOT the inertia of the particle, i.e. NOT what you would get from observing a force, an acceleration, and dividing one by the other. It is NOT the source or coupling to gravity, which is stress-energy, NOT mass. It is nothing but an attempt to allow students to retain their naive semi-Newtonian heuristics so that the teachers don't have to teach so much. It leads to misconceptions and a poor, shallow understanding of the theory. Don't use it.
gintable
2010-07-22 16:53:08 UTC
I argue...yes they do. Go ahead, thumb me down!



Photons are defined as packets of light energy. Because they have energy, according to the mass-energy equivalence principle, they have corresponding mass when in motion at the speed of light equal to h*f/c^2.



So, 500 THz yellow light would have a mass of 3.681*10^(-36) kg. A population of 250000 of these photons would be equivalently massive as an electron at relativistically slow speed.



It is REST MASS of which photons have zero. BUT, photons do not exist at rest...they only exist at the speed of light. Relativistic mass increase accounts for a zero-rest-mass body to have finite mass at the speed of light.



We do know evidence of this as both inertia and gravitation, as we know of evidence of all other mass.



Inertial evidence: radiation pressure phenomena

Gravitational evidence: gravitational lensing of light, black holes
?
2010-07-22 16:59:44 UTC
Yes it has mass.



1.672621637(83)×10−27 kg



Answer



The mass of the proton is determined in a similar way to how the mass of atoms are measured. The particle, whose mass is being determined, is accelerated through an electric field, the particle then passes through a perpendicular magnetic field which deflects the particle (particle must be charged, a proton or an ion for example, for it to deflect). The angle by which it deflects is dependent on the mass of the particle. The mass of the particle can be determined by using the following formula:



Centripetal Force = Force due to magnetic field(B)



(mv2)/r = Bqv



(where m = mass of particle, v = velocity of particle, r= radius of deflected path, B = magnetic field strength, q = charge of particle)
skwonripken
2010-07-22 16:55:46 UTC
I was watching the science channel last night, and they said that photons DO have mass.
SPIKE the free thinker
2010-07-22 16:52:46 UTC
No, photons do not have mass, but they do have momentum.
?
2010-07-22 16:53:31 UTC
No. But they have "mass-like properties" such as momentum.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
Loading...