TITLE:
Are Photons Massless or Massive?
AUTHORS:
Golden Gadzirayi Nyambuya
KEYWORDS:
Curved Spacetime Dirac Equation, General Spin Dirac Equation, Massive Photon, Unified Field Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Modern Physics,
Vol.5 No.18,
December
25,
2014
ABSTRACT: Prevailing
and conventional wisdom as drawn from both Professor Albert Einstein’s Special
Theory of Relativity (STR) and
our palatable experience, holds that photons are massless particles and that,
every particle that travels at the speed of light must—accordingly, be
massless. Amongst other important but now resolved problems in physics, this
assumption led to the Neutrino Mass Problem—namely, “Do neutrinos have
mass?” Neutrinos appear very strongly to travel at the speed of light and
according to the afore-stated, they must be massless. Massless neutrinos have a
problem in that one is unable to explain the phenomenon of neutrino
oscillations because this requires massive neutrinos. Experiments appear to
strongly suggest that indeed, neutrinos most certainly are massive particles.
While this solves the problem of neutrino oscillation, it directly leads to
another problem, namely that of “How can a massive particle travel at the
speed of light? Is not this
speed a preserve and prerogative of only massless particles?” We argue herein
that in principle, it is possible for massive particles to travel at the
speed of light. In presenting the present letter, our hope is that this may aid
or contribute significantly in solving the said problem of “How can massive
particles travel at the speed of light?”