Author(s)

Golden Gadzirayi Nyambuya^*

Department of Applied Physics, National University of Science and Technology, Bulawayo, Republic of Zimbabwe.

Prevailing and conventional wisdom as drawn from both Professor Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (STR) and our palatable experience, holds that photons are massless particles and that, every particle that travels at the speed of light must—accordingly, be massless. Amongst other important but now resolved problems in physics, this assumption led to the Neutrino Mass Problem—namely, “Do neutrinos have mass?” Neutrinos appear very strongly to travel at the speed of light and according to the afore-stated, they must be massless. Massless neutrinos have a problem in that one is unable to explain the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations because this requires massive neutrinos. Experiments appear to strongly suggest that indeed, neutrinos most certainly are massive particles. While this solves the problem of neutrino oscillation, it directly leads to another problem, namely that of “How can a massive particle travel at the speed of light? Is not this speed a preserve and prerogative of only massless particles?” We argue herein that in principle, it is possible for massive particles to travel at the speed of light. In presenting the present letter, our hope is that this may aid or contribute significantly in solving the said problem of “How can massive particles travel at the speed of light?”

Curved Spacetime Dirac Equation, General Spin Dirac Equation, Massive Photon, Unified Field Theory

Nyambuya, G. (2014) Are Photons Massless or Massive?. Journal of Modern Physics, 5, 2111-2124. doi: 10.4236/jmp.2014.518207.