@whodey If you launch two powerful laser beams side by side into space, they don't attract one another.
If you launch two well collimated neutral beams of matter into space, they will attract each other and combine eventually into one beam because the mass of the beam bends spacetime whereas photon beams are incapable of doing that showing photons have zero mass.
@whodeysaid Which is a better statement, we are made of photons/atoms?
I assume atoms are "created/manufactured" after the photons "transition".
We are not "made of photons," nor "made of atoms," nor "made of photons/atoms." Atoms are not "created/manufactured after the photons (sic) transition" (whatever that means).
I suggest you learn about physics before questioning basic physics knowledge.
@sonhousesaid @whodey If you launch two powerful laser beams side by side into space, they don't attract one another.
If you launch two well collimated neutral beams of matter into space, they will attract each other and combine eventually into one beam because the mass of the beam bends spacetime whereas photon beams are incapable of doing that showing photons have zero mass.
I don't think this is right. It's energy-momentum density that appears in the Einstein Field equations so the curvature tensor will be non-zero in the region the laser light is passing through. So there should be a gravitational field. We know gravitational fields affect the path light takes as one of the confirmed predictions of General Relativity. So I think they'll attract each other.
@DeepThought Well it would not be the mass of the photons causing any intersection, that would be due to gravitational lensing. If the light beams came from inside a large gravitational field aimed outwards, I would think the opposite would happen, again not due to mass effects but due to the curvature of space.
If you could do a multi-billion year experiment with two laser beams side by side and just aimed them out into space, say in a direction that would allow the beams to go into intergalactic space, the beams could diverge and come together many times on its way to the visible edge of the universe. Still having nothing to do with photons being massless.
What is a photon?
11 Feb '19 21:03
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