The Question
(Submitted November 02, 1996) This questions has been bugging me and my chemistry class. Does
light have
mass? Most people would think not but here's why I argue against it. Even though light does not effect anything it its path like a solid object, it is affected by
gravity. Anything that has mass is affected by gravity. Why do I say that light has mass? Well, If a
black holes gravity field is so strong that light cannot escape itself, light must have mass? Am I right? Everyone argues against it.
The Answer
These are interesting issues that you bring up. Whether or not light (or more accurately
photons, the indivisible units in which light can be emitted or absorbed) has mass, and how it is affected by gravity, puzzled scientists for many, many years. Figuring it all out is what made
Albert Einstein famous. Bear with me and I'll try to explain both the theory and the observation. Back in the 1700s, scientists were still struggling to understand which theory of light was correct: was it composed of particles or was it made of waves? Under the theory that light is waves, it was not clear how it would respond to gravity. But if light was composed of particles, it would be expected that they would be affected by gravity in the same way apples and planets are. This expectation grew when it was discovered that light did not travel infinitely fast, but with a finite measurable velocity.
Armed with these facts, a paper was published in 1783 by John Michell, in which he pointed out that a sufficiently massive compact
star would possess a strong enough gravitational field that light could not escape --- any light emitted from the star's surface would be dragged back by the star's gravity before it could get very far. The French scientist Laplace came to a similar conclusion at roughly the same time.
Not much was done over the next hundred years or so with the ideas of Michell and Laplace. This was mostly true because during that time, the wave theory of light became the more accepted one. And no one understood how light, as a wave, could be affected by gravity.
Enter Albert Einstein. In 1915 he proposed the theory of
general relativity. General relativity explained, in a consistent way, how gravity affects light. We now knew that while photons have no mass, they do possess momentum (so your statement about light not affecting
matter is incorrect). We also knew that photons are affected by gravitational fields not because photons have mass, but because gravitational fields (in particular, strong gravitational fields) change the shape of space-time. The photons are responding to the curvature in space-time, not directly to the gravitational field. Space-time is the four-dimensional "space" we live in -- there are 3 spatial dimensions (think of X,Y, and Z) and one time dimension.
Let us relate this to light traveling near a star. The strong gravitational field of the star changes the paths of light rays in space-time from what they would have been had the star not been present. Specifically, the path of the light is bent slightly inward toward the surface of the star. We see this effect all the time when we observe distant stars in our
Universe. As a star contracts, the gravitational field at its surface gets stronger, thus bending the light more. This makes it more and more difficult for light from the star to escape, thus it appears to us that the star is dimmer. Eventually, if the star shrinks to a certain critical radius, the gravitational field at the surface becomes so strong that the path of the light is bent so severely inward so that it returns to the star itself. The light can no longer escape. According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. Thus, if light cannot escape, neither can anything else. Everything is dragged back by the gravitational field. We call the region of space for which this condition is true a "black hole" (a term first coined by American scientist John Wheeler in 1969).
Now, being scientists, we do not just accept theories like general relativity or conclusions like photons have no mass. We constantly test them, trying to definitively prove or disprove. So far, general relativity has withstood every test. And try as we might, we can measure no mass for the photon. We can just put upper limits on what mass it can have. These upper limits are determined by the
sensitivity of the experiment we are using to try to "weigh the photon". The last number I saw was that a photon, if it has any mass at all, must be less than 4 x 10-48 grams. For comparison, the electron has a mass of 9 x 10-28 grams.
Hope this answers the questions that you and your Chemistry class have.
Good luck,
Laura Whitlock.
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