Random Physics Comment

A friend recommended I read Einstein's 1905 papers. I must admit I only grasped a little of it, and only because I came at it backward (catching the cliff notes in years prior). He did mention something important before recommending it though: light has no mass.

This struck me as odd. In a paper focused and built so heavily on symmetry, to have this exception seems odd. Light has energy, which has a mass equivalent according to the paper, but for some reason light is an exception to this rule. Stranger still to me, experiments have verified this. This means either light is something in the universe that need not follow the rules of everything else, or that we lack something required to accurately identify how it does follow these rules, experimentally.

What is stranger still is that much like other assumptions in prior generations of far reaching theories, light being massless seems to be commonly accepted. Most likely this is because the genius presenting the equation indicated it to be so, but the same was true of Maxwell (in the papers) and many other great geniuses before the papers were written. If a theory can provide more correct calculations than the ones preceding it, it should be accepted, including the exceptions it draws, until another can replace it in the same way. The exceptions are clues for where and how to start developing the next more accurate theory.

In this case I am focused on the concept of effective mass. As light can be seen (and other EM fields detected), it must be something, and as something it must have energy, which would lead one to assume, based on Einstein's overall structure presented, that it would also have mass.

Since all I have are dully honed instincts in the field, I suggest this: mass is not zero, but if 0 is to be used it allows for a symbol to enter play which I have been trying to identify (on the shape of the infinite/infinitesimal). ¤ = 1/0.

So if E=mc^2
E/¤ =c^2
m=1/¤.

Basically if one wants m to return to zero for light as observed, one must simply subtract out 1/¤.  If ¤ is a non real number, this can be disregarded. If ¤ is a real number however, it means there is a slight amount of mass reduction to everything. From another perspective (or in calculating something yet unobserved) there would also be an equivalent slight boost in mass.

It is actually quite easy to write equivalent equations, but the question is: do the added components add anything to the equation's ability to predict outcomes, or can they be proven incorrect? This leads me to wonder if any experiments have been undertaken that could differentiate between 0 and ¤, especially when the underlying assumption is that for all "real" objects the 1/¤ component is designed to balance out to 0. I believe this would require an experiment that included quantum observations, or observations of dark matter/energy to identify the difference, as here the effects may be more pronounced or even inverted, but this is the extent to which even my seemingly (admittedly) baseless instincts end.

Final note: ¤ and 1/¤ could be the same number in this example as I think about it further, either representing something very small or very large. For now I use 1/¤ because my first answer for ¤ was huge, and at least for this equation we are looking for the small value of m, a small bump. As in most divergent equations in a symmetrical system though, I imagine both have meaning and validity.

6/30/22 Update: In more recent years I have primarily been using ¤ to represent something infinitesimal, though I feel like the concept of functionally infinite and infinitesimal represented as options in the same symbol had an elegance to it, especially if one pictures the limits of space and time as if they were being examined from the outside from any angle in similar or the same way, like a fence barely peeked over.