1 + 2 + 3 + ... = -1/12

[carey]

(10-27-2024 12:36 PM)AnnoyedOne Wrote:  Which leads me to a few "pet peeves".

"The mass of a photon is zero."
Er, no it isn't. It may be really really small, even unmeasurable, but it has some mass.

As the above is off-topic, my reply will be brief. While everyone is entitled to their personal opinions, there is no debate on this issue in the professional physics community. The Standard Model in particle physics requires a massless photon (gauge symmetry). If the point being made is that it’s not possible to measure zero mass, that’s why increasingly precise physics experiments obtain tighter and tighter upper bounds on the mass, as expected for a massless particle. (To be clear, we’re talking about zero rest mass, not relativistic mass).

Edit: Just noticed that Nigel (UK) made a similar reply.