Light React with Matter?
It’s very hard to absorb a truth especially when you already hold some belief against it. Once I wrote a sentence in my essay which exactly was,
“Light, in the absence of matter is mere darkness”
Many of my friends deliberately criticized the notion and said that light becomes light after emitting from some immaterial source. I, in a second found what they assumed by my sentence and why they shielded the matter even when matter was already being dominated in my sentence, see what I said was,
“Light, in the absence of matter is mere darkness”
Explanation
I actually meant that in observable world we call light only to visible electromagnetic waves with a very specific frequency and no other type of the EM spectrum is actually meant here which means that light is visible only when it colloids with matter otherwise you can’t see light. Imagine! In outer world where there is total darkness and all glittering objects are pure matter.
Imagine! If there was no matter in space, how would we even know about light at first place? Whenever we see light with our own eyes we just see only a piece of matter and not in fact the light itself because the light itself is invisible. It shows things when colloids with them but it never shows its own physical body because there is none.
Photons have Momentum
We know that light is composed of little particles called photons. We also know that photons are massless particles. Every particle which is massless definitely travels with the speed of light that is why it is also called light particles even if it’s not a particle of visible light. But if any particles does not travel with the speed of light that does not deserve to be called the light particle for example Electrons are not light particles because they don’t travel with the speed of light.
Photons are massless that is why they travel with the speed of light but how a massless particle can have momentum? We know that photons have momentum. It is a very interesting question. Because photons travel with speed of light and sometime they colloid with other particles which confirms that they indeed have momentum. In order to get the amount, though never exact, of a photon’s momentum we need fabricate a theoretical mass in a photon mathematically. A photon which colloids with some other particle and shifts its total momentum to that particle disappears immediately.