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davasour davasour
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11 years ago
i nedd to know it that how light can travel at this speed if it is a material particle
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wrote...
11 years ago
light is composed of photons which behave both as waves and partciels and they travel with speed of light. but light is not particles.
wrote...
11 years ago
light is  a particle of energy and not material particle .

All material particles have some rest mass where as light particle has zero rest mass.

Only particles which has non zero rest mass cannot travel with the speed of light.
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wrote...
11 years ago
Photons don't have mass, but they do have energy--and as Einstein famously proved, mass and energy are really the same thing. So photons have momentum--but what exactly is a photon? For centuries, a heated debate went on as to whether light is made up of particles or waves. In some experiments, like Young's double slit experiment, light clearly showed itself to be a wave, but other phenomena, such as the photoelectric effect, demonstrated equally clearly that light was a particle.
wrote...
11 years ago
Like all elementary particles, photons travel like waves and interact like particles. That doesn't make them "matter" or "material." The important point is that they have no mass.
wrote...
11 years ago
photons dont have mass but they do have energy..and light is composed of photons
wrote...
11 years ago
It isn't a material particle.  Not in the way you're thinking, anyways.

An object with a rest mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light because its mass increases as it moves faster, resulting in an infinite force being required to get it to light speed.

Light, when interpreted as a photon, has no rest mass, and therefore travels at the speed of light.  However, since light carries energy, it has a momentum, which gives it an equivalent relativistic mass through the mass-energy equivalence equation, E=mc^2.  But this does not give it a rest mass.

[I would expect Nikola Tesla to understand this.]
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