The Gravity of a Photon

What I&#x27;ve always found wild about gravity and photons is that gravity produces the same proportionate effect, i.e., acceleration, on them as it does normal matter and the only reason the sun and planets don&#x27;t render light nearly unusable for sensing by utterly distorting the light&#x27;s path is that it travels so quickly it doesn&#x27;t spend any significant amount of time in a gravity well.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever fully wrap my head around the kind of numbers that implies, that when light is at approximately sea level it is accelerating at 9.8m&#x2F;s^2 toward the core of the earth and the only reason it doesn&#x27;t all get dragged out of the air and to the ground is that it moves too fast to notice.

The important thing to remember is it&#x27;s called the stress-energy tensor for a reason, it&#x27;s not just mass distribution that causes curvature.<p>Thought experiment: which will curve spacetime more, a 1kg box of gas at 1K or the same box after the gas inside is raised to 293K?

I find gravity interesting, because <i>everything</i> that exists interacts with <i>everything</i> via the gravitational field. This is not the case with any other sort of interaction; gravity is truly different. See this diagram showing the ways that different particles can interact in the Standard Model: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;4&#x2F;4c&#x2F;Elementary_particle_interactions.svg&#x2F;400px-Elementary_particle_interactions.svg.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;4&#x2F;4c&#x2F;El...</a><p>Photons, for instance, cannot interact directly with each other via the electromagnetic field. Gluons do self-interact via the strong interaction. But both photons and gluons interact with all types of particles via gravity (although sometimes this interaction is so small that we would never be able to measure it).

&gt; because photons have rest energy that can be viewed as mass in special relativity<p>What?

The low contrast on that web page is terrible.

If you think electrons and positrons have a gravitational influence, then it seems to me you should also think photons do. Otherwise, if an electron and positron annihilate, producing photons, there will be a discontinuous drop in the gravitational field, which doesn&#x27;t seem right somehow. Furthermore, if you put all this in a black box, the gravitational influence of the box will change because of what&#x27;s happening within it, which also doesn&#x27;t seem right.<p>Can anyone with with real knowledge of gravity comment on whether these two intuitions are correct?

Wow I didn&#x27;t expect that! For the layperson that&#x27;s really interesting.<p>&quot;the conventional electromagnetic fields, and the photons that constitute them, impact the gravitational field despite having no inertial mass!&quot;<p>Does that mean the build up of the photon sphere around a black hole would have a significant impact on space time?

I don t understand. The title is gravity of photon. Then you start talking about electromagnetic field. I sure something is missing here. What would be the source of gravitation and who is subject to that field?

This is really interesting. Perhaps there is also a chance that electromagnetic fields are indeed entirely responsible for gravity, in some complicated yet unknown manner.