How can photons be massless
[From: ] [author: ] [Date: 12-12-23] [Hit: ]
duh, the speed of light.And I suspect you know what happens to the inertia of a rest mass, m, when v = c, its velocity reaches light speed.......
In any case, photons have zero Rest Mass.
When we get into Relativity, “mass” has 2 different meanings. There is “Rest Mass” and “Relativistic Mass” and they are NOT the same thing.
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Better ask, "How can they not be massless?" After all, they travel at, duh, the speed of light. And I suspect you know what happens to the inertia of a rest mass, m, when v = c, it's velocity reaches light speed.
Your assertions are so filled with misinformation, I hardly know where to begin.
But let's tackle "photons have been shown to oscillate between various different kinds/wavelengths, which apparently requires mass to occur (at least according to leading authorities on neutrinos" What you are referring to is the so-called neutrino oscillation, but...this is important...that's not wave frequency oscillation. That's oscillating between three kinds of neutrino. In other words, there is but one neutrino but it oscillates through three different phases to show up as three different kinds of neutrino.
And the reason this neutrino oscillation forces us to conclude that neutrinos have mass is because those phase changes have a periodicity. That is, they indicate time passing for that neutrino. And that means...drum roll please...the neutrino cannot be going the speed of light (time would stand still if it did) so the neutrino has to have some mass, m. You see, only things going light speed and time stands still for them are massless.
But photons are going the speed of light and they are eternal, time stands still for them. So they must be massless. And I prove that below under source. Check it out.
Another bad assertion, e = mc^2 is the source of energy for a photon, so e = 0 as m = 0 for photons. The mass-energy equivalent term, e = mc^2, is not the only source of energy for particles. There is also kinetic energy. In fact, we can show that E = Mc^2 is total energy, e = mc^2 is the mass equivalent energy, and k = Mvc is the kinetic energy. They are related by E^2 = e^2 + k^2; so when m = 0 so that e = 0, the total energy is E = Mc^2 = Mvc = k the kinetic energy, which you can see when v = c is the speed of the particle. M is the relativistic inertia of the particle. [See source.]
