Quote:
Originally Posted by Eratosthenes
....and yet the insanity of Quantum Electrodynamics developed by Schwinger, Feynman and Tomonaga in the 1940s predicts that photons can possess mass - and in some cases a large mass. (they escape this lunacy by suggesting that as long as the mass vanishes relatively quickly, then its permitted. Quantum foam is another animal all together ladies and gentlemen - foam seems to be floating around between the ears of physicists in departments and asylums around the world)
There seems to be no limit to the depths of Psychiatric lunacy that modern Physics can plunge to....
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So you are now engaging in blatant dishonesty or a total lack of comprehension of the subject.
Schwinger and Feymann considered photons to have a fictional mass to explain the Lamb shift (spectral shift of hydrogen emission lines) in 1947.
QED is the application of Special Relativity (SR) to Quantum Mechanics but in 1947 it was a work in progress and scientists were still struggling with some very unusual consequences of QED such as negative probabilities and negative energies. Electromagnetic fields explained as mathematical operators for simple harmonic oscillators was in its infancy and renormalization theory which addressed problems such as Lamb shift was still decades away to being accepted as mainstream.
Schwinger and Feynmann attempted to explain Lamb shift using non relativistic calculations and the concept of fictional mass which they eventually conceded WAS WRONG.
Strange how you conveniently omit this point or are you naive enough to think QED is still stuck in the world of 1947.
If you seriously think that Quantum physicists of TODAY hold this 1947 view, it is like the snake beginning by swallowing its own tail and eventually consuming itself in the process.
QED is the application of special relativity to Quantum Mechanics where photons have a zero REST mass. If not QED collapses like a deck of cards as it is not consistent with special relativity, the theory that it is built on.
Photons travelling at c however do exhibit properties associated with mass.
Do you understand what a zero rest mass is? Probably not.
Here is some simple arithmetic for you.
The total energy of a particle according to special relativity is given by the formula.
E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4. p is momentum, m is rest mass and c the speed of light.
For a photon the rest mass is zero hence
E=pc.
While a photon has a zero REST mass, it is a particle with RELATIVISTIC "mass", given that relativistic mass is the total energy of the particle.
Photons possess a momentum p=E/c which is a very "mass like" characteristic given in classical physics p=mv where v is the particle velocity.
The photoelectric effect illustrates this as electrons are knocked out of atoms by photons.
So while photons have zero rest mass, it exhibits "mass properties" as a particle travelling at c.
