What is light? What is mass? What is energy? These are questions we all  have been answering since middle school. In simple words energy is simply a body’s potential to work or some sort of work. Let’s talk about energy, the energy we use in our daily lives, do these kinds of energy have mass? Can a hungry person with a 60 kg mass weigh more than a 60 kg person that just had breakfast?

We do know that a clock when it is placed on a table, possesses potential energy, and a clock that is on the floor at the ground and zero joules of potential energy. Do they have the same mass, if their energies are different? Can the mass of a body be increased when its energy is increased? The answer is yes it can. I am going to mess with your Physics knowledge, you have heard that the mass of an object always remains constant but that is not always true!

Tell me the mass of light. Can you? Nobody can, because it is infinite. According to general theory of relativity, the mass of an object can be increased by the increase of its energy. That energy can be in any form, does not matter if it is kinetic, potential, nuclear or chemical. Increase in energy increases mass and increase in mass, increases energy. For example, the gas in your car has mass and that mass is burned that produces heat energy for your engine to move.

So, you increase the potential energy of a clock, by raising it up, you can increase it’s mass but that increase in the mass is so negligible that we don’t count it as an increase, it might cause 0.000000001 grams of increase in its mass. It all depends on its energy, greater the energy, greater the increase in the mass will be. Take light for example, the fastest speed in this universe is the speed of light. That means light has the highest kinetic energy in this universe, which in turn means that light has infinite mass. The faster  you are, the faster your time gets, because you are not allowing much gravity to act upon  you because of your speed and the faster you move, your mass increases so much that if you move close to the speed of light then your mass can reach to infinity. I know all this sounds like a lie, but this is how Quantum Physics works. I will talk more about Quantum Physics, light being a particle and a wave in the next blog, till then hang tight.