#5: Throwing 'Light' on The Einstein Paradox

Hey there!
dont go too hay-way about the title of the blog,dude, you have seen it right. I call it the Einstein paradox, for reasons, gonna become obvious.
For a start, lets get back to our good old classical mechanics where everything starts acting weird and spooky. Oh yea, its this spookiness that led people take 'biggg' magnifying glasses and dig out such brilliant fundae as the strings, anti-gravity, anti-matter, especially quantum,etc. all is well till here. One big lead in this battalion of people was Albert Einstein.
As you should know, if you intend to stick to the rest of the blog, any body exibhits two kind of masses. The rest mass and the effective mass when in motion. Usually, whenever a body is in motion, its 'effective' mass will not be the same as what it was. But that difference is usually negligible for what bodies we come across everyday, or the macro ones. When we look at the atomic and sub-atomic level, things change. This was when a definition for a rest mass and mass in motion was needed- all a consequence of the theory of relativity.
When proposing the theory of relativity, Einstein has given his two most famous postulates, put in very simple terms as-
-speed of light is absolute
-speed of light is invariant
The reason behind the light's speed being absolute, was that the rest mass of a photon,(~a particle of light) is considered zero. And thus, lights speed was set as the limit and absolute. and there comes our famous equation, E=m*c^2.
BUT.. there is no solid proof to the statements made above. Oh yes, they say that the nuclear fission and fusion reactions carried out practically agreed with the equation. Well, right now i can only say hypothetically, that there might be energy which might be 'invisible' to those who are tapping it. Its still a mystery. How could one just set the limit like that? why is mass of a photon zero? (refer to 'tachyons') Why is lights speed invariant? Hope it gets resolved with a strong evidence one day.....
Waiting for such a day,
shampoo
(This led me to go and work on relativity at IITM but in vain. There needs to be a strong proof and that can only come through practical demos, but I dont think there are instruments in todays world, where we can scale things up to the level of 'light'- the Almighty of classical mechanics. )