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Originally posted by Johnny Boy:
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Originally posted by Count Iblis II:
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Johnny Boy! The question that was asked was whether it is theoretically possible for the photon to have a nonzero mass, given all what we know today (i.e. all the experimentally established facts). By stating that [QUOTE] A photon can never be at rest within any inertial reference frame
you are already assuming that the photon is massless. The question is if we can drop this assumption.

The answer is that while the best theories we have predict that the photon is exactly massless, it is not theoretically impossible for the photon to have a very very small mass.
OK that is another aspect of the question which, I agree, I have not been addressing in my analysis. As I said, I am always open to new ideas; but they are difficult to swallow at this stage of the game when they are based on Higgs bosons; maybe in a couple of years the Hadron Collider will provide an answer. After all, theoretically anything is possible, but it takes experiment to decide which theoretical description really tallies with experiment. You can even have a mathematical description that tallies with experiment because it is mathematically consistent; but it does not really describe the underlying physics; for example, you can repoduce violin music in terms of digital code, but this does not imply that violin nopte are physically digital code. You can assume, like Feynman, that an electron can do "anything" and then add enough of these "anythings" to get a description which seems to represent the electron. This, however, does not prove to me that an electron can do "anything".
I agree with this, but this argument can work in many ways. E.g. when we detect particles like electrons or photons what we really 'see'' are effects in macroscopic detectors. The theory describing electrons and photons, Quantum Mechanics, in fact precludes you from observing particles in the same way you can observe classical objects. This means that it is theoretically possible that the Standard Model is just some effective theory and that the particles it describes don't really exist.

Such theories have been proposed by 't Hooft. He has proposed deterministic models. Bell's theorem is evaded because the particles are only effective mathematical objects that appear in intermediary calculations.