Universe probably not weighed down by photons with mass

Advice a photon has probably never received.

University of Michigan, Flint

The photon is aloof from its peers. Massless, it races through the Universe at the speed of light, un-aging from the point of view of our slow-moving selves. Being massless imparts immortality of a sort. Photons are the ultimate in stable particles—they can't spontaneously decay into a light particle, because they are the lightest particle around.

Fellow conspiracy theorists, prepare your tin-foil hats. What if all that weren't true? What if the photon had mass, did age, and could decay? Could it be possible? According to German physicist Julian Heeck, the answer is "Yes." But that "yes" is limited by some seriously accurate experimental data.

Having given away the punch line, let's go back and explain the joke (I'm told that jokes are always funnier when you explain them). We begin with a bunch of equations. The nice thing about equations is that you can always bolt extra bits on them. This is essentially what you do when you consider the photon having mass. But when you do that, things go very wrong. Suddenly, infinities produced by the equations that used to go away hang around, drink all your beer, and insist on watching re-runs of Murder, She Wrote. It just doesn't bear thinking about.