How can light accelerate to such a huge velocity?

AI Thread Summary
Light, or photons, travel at the speed of light (c) and do not accelerate, as they have zero mass. Their momentum is a result of their velocity, not mass. The discussion raises questions about the energy involved in photon generation and the potential recoil from electron transitions in atoms. The concept of Planck time is introduced to highlight the limits of measurement in physics, suggesting that changes at such tiny scales are beyond current detection capabilities. Overall, the conversation explores the nature of light and its behavior within the framework of modern physics.
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I mean if light has relative mass
which makes its mass near to infinity,
then from where does it get the energy
to accelerate such a heavy thing to such a
huge velocity?
 
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DaveC426913 said:
Photons have zero mass. That's why they can - and must - move at c. They do have momentum, due to their velocity.

(http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/relmom.html - "Momentum of Photon" - halfway down the page)

Photons do not accelerate. They move at c from emission to absorption.

Has that been proven?

It would be interesting to see an experiment to see if there were recoil from the generation of a photon from a hydrogen atom electron orbital change.

zero to c in a Planck moment. :smile:

hmmm...

never mind.

wiki said:
One Planck time is the time it would take a photon traveling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to one Planck length. Theoretically, this is the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible,[3] roughly 10−43 seconds. Within the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, for times less than one Planck time apart, we can neither measure nor detect any change. As of May 2010, the smallest time interval that was directly measured was on the order of 12 attoseconds (12 × 10−18 seconds),[4] about 1024 times larger than the Planck time.

I can't imagine anything that tiny.

But then again, maybe the photon was always there, traveling at the speed of light, and was simply manifesting itself as the particle we observed before, in some twisted poly-dimensional world we will never comprehend.

But then again, maybe I should go to bed.
 
OmCheeto said:
It would be interesting to see an experiment to see if there were recoil from the generation of a photon from a hydrogen atom electron orbital change.

There IS a recoil, although so tiny that we can't imagine it.
 
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