Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

206 submissions , 164 unreviewed
5,103 questions , 2,249 unanswered
5,355 answers , 22,800 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  How can massless particles (even when at rest) combine together to form objects that have mass?

+ 0 like - 2 dislike
2592 views

I was reading this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter and in the first paragraph I got across the line stating - "... massless particles may be composed to form objects that have mass (even when at rest)."

From another Wikipedia article I got to knew that there are only two massless particles viz. photon and gluon. So, how is this feasible that many photons/gluons can be compsoed to form object that have mass? Is it through the pair production from the energy that photon carries or is it something else? Can pair production like thing happen with gluons too?

Closed as per community consensus as the post is not graduate-level
asked Feb 7, 2017 in Closed Questions by AnkitChabarwal [ no revision ]
recategorized Feb 8, 2017 by Dilaton
Most voted comments show all comments

This is nonsense. Massless particles cannot be at rest. Wikipedia is not always reliable, as you can see from this manifestly wrong claim. For other wrong claims see my article 
''Misconceptions about Virtual Particles''   

Oh my Gosh! PO becomes almost like Physics SE -- total laymen are here!

vote to close as not being graduate+ level

You need to upvote the linked vote to close, not the comment!

@Dilaton OK, then I will work harder on answering questions to get enough reputation.

Most recent comments show all comments

Sorry, no, it is not yet hidden, and one needs 500 rep to upvote a close vote.

@AndreyFeldman you are highly cool ;-) !

The issue is that to see the closevote thread you need 500 rep, which in particular at quiet times sometimes gives us a hard time to gather the 3 closevotes needed to close a question





user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...