Hi;

I confess. I am a 25 year amateur veteran of all aspects of Astrophysics. I can find nothing that answers the question that is constructed as follows:

Wiki says that a photon has no rest mass, thus, it is "massless", and "invariant" when at rest. Ergo, when a photon is performing work, travelling at the speed of light, it is in motion, as a "single" or a "wave". Now, if it is massless, as a moving "thing", it is a "moving nothing", (since it has no mass). An object of any kind that is motive, must have mass to accomplish work, because nothing, when pushing nothing, equals no work done.
Without some mass, a photon could not be the proctor of electromotive force.

So, here is my speculative question:

Since neutrinos are said to have a tiny quantity of mass (per Wiki), and they interact at the tiniest subatomic level, are neutrinos possibly the endlessly available "mass-provider" to the massless photon, which allows each photon to perform work, such as has to be happening, if a photon is not just an unmoving massless "nothing", when at rest?
Hope you get my drift.
Thanks

Fleep

Photons are never at rest. While photons are massless, they do have energy and momentum. They are not 'nothing'.

It has no rest mass but it has momentum. It’s a force carrier.

"Notice that you can never have zero momentum, since something with zero mass and zero energy isn’t something, it’s nothing. This is just another way of saying that light can never be stationary."

How can photons have energy and momentum but no mass?

Ah, AlexG beat me to it but I always add links.

Qualifier>IMO (Please feel perfectly free to ignore it.)

Photons, (unless interacting with an object that has a rest mass where they are quantized) are @ rest in time.

Time moves @ C omnidirectionaly.

A photons momentum is dependent on the relative velocities of the transmitter and receiver and the receivers' ability to interact with the photon.