Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Having a mass of zero.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In physics, devoid of mass.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Having no mass.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • 2. Light is virtually massless: Light is typically described as massless, or weightless, especially when it is functioning like a wave.

    The Sacred Promise Phd Gary E. Schwartz 2011

  • 2. Light is virtually massless: Light is typically described as massless, or weightless, especially when it is functioning like a wave.

    The Sacred Promise Phd Gary E. Schwartz 2011

  • Furthermore, we can start from the idea of massless spin-two gravitons coupled to energy and momentum, and show that the nonlinear completion of such a theory leads to Einstein’s equation.

    What I Believe But Cannot Prove Sean 2007

  • The Weyl curvature thereby returns to zero, all particles are massless again, and conformal invariance resumes.

    Archive 2009-05-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • The fact that the universe is very small and hot at the beginning, and very large and cold in the far future, is not a problem, argues Penrose, because both the early universe and far future universe contain only conformally invariant, massless particles.

    Archive 2009-05-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • The discussions remind me of the massless beams, frictionless planes, and inviscid/incompressible flows that dot the physics and engineering pedagogy: very useful to a point, and wildly inaccurate past that point.

    Roll Over, Ricardo, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • I totally agree that language and language change is handled through handwavium (the invisible massless isotope, at that) more than it ought to be, in SF/F writing.

    Howard Hughes and the Wretched Crack of Noon musey_q 2010

  • However, our technique focuses on the massless, subnuclear particles and interactions, such as gluons, neutrinos, and hyperphotons.

    365 tomorrows » 2009 » April : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day 2009

  • Likewise, as one goes far enough into our distant, boring future, if everything turns into massless radiation, there's no usable energy scale—and the geometry is also conformal.

    In the End Is the Beginning Peter Woit 2011

  • A “principled conservative” is one of those mythical creatures that exists only in thought experiments, kind of like frictionless surfaces, massless strings, point masses, etc.

    Matthew Yglesias » Lessig on Corruption and the Right 2010

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