"Ron Patrick has decided to go that little bit further by souping up his VW beetle with a jet engine, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. Serious planning went into the project. Patrick said, 'We did (computerized) structural analysis and we did stability analysis. And by God, you know what happens? It works!' Contrast with the Rocket Boy to see how it should not be done." Yes, the Darwin award winner was found to be bogus, but unlike the myth, Ron still lives!. He said that a jet-boosted run will "pin the speedometer and that's at 140." He thinks that when it hits 160 mph -- he hasn't seen that ... yet -- the car will start lifting off the ground, but "the fun is not necessarily how fast you want to go. The fun is the sound of the thing. Just starting it up, it's like a (Boeing) 747 landing in your front yard."
The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...
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