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Old 06-11-2007, 07:31 PM
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robagar
lost in Calabi-Yau space

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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Cairns
Posts: 161
You certainly can't accelerate a non-zero mass to the speed of light, so yes I *think* it means you can say that anything going at light speed must be massless.

Another way of looking at it is this: if a photon can disappear without hitting anything else, then it must have a finite lifetime. But the time dilation effect at light speed is infinite, so we could never see it happen. Therefore photons must live forever
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