electromagnetism - What is momentum really?

Wikipedia defines momentum as in classical mechanics:

In classical mechanics, linear momentum or translational momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object.

However, an electromagnetic field has momentum, which is how solar sails work.

I would not suppose that this is a product of the 'mass' and velocity of the field.

Light has momentum too as I understand.

So what is momentum, conceptually?

Answer

Momentum / energy are the conserved Noether charges that correspond, by dint of Noether's Theorem to the invariance of the Lagrangian description of a system with respect to translation.

Whenever a physical system's Lagrangian is invariant under a continuous transformation (e.g. shift of spatial / temporal origin, rotation of co-ordinates), there must be a conserved quantity, called the Noether charge for that transformation.

We then define the conserved charges for spatial and temporal translation as momentum and energy, respectively; angular momentum is the conserved Noether charge corresponding to invariance of a Lagrangian with respect to rotation of co-ordinates.

One can derive the more usual expressions for these quantities from a Lagrangian formulation of Newtonian mechanics. When Maxwell's equations and electromagnetism are included in a Lagrangian formulation, we find that there are still invariances with the above continuous transformations, and so we need to broaden our definitions of momentum to include those of the electromagnetic field.

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User ACuriousMind writes:

I think it would be good to point out that the notion of "canonical momentum" in Hamiltonian mechanics need not coincide with this one (as is the case for e.g. a particle coupled to the electromagnetic field)

When applied to the EM field, we use a field theoretic version of Noether's theorem and the Lagrangian is a spacetime integral of a Lagrangian density; the Noether currents for a free EM field are the components of the stress-energy tensor $T$ and the resultant conservation laws $T_\mu{}^\nu{}_{,\,\nu}=0$ follow from equating the divergence to nought. This includes Poynting's theorem - the postulated statement of conservation of energy (see my answer to this question here) and the conservation of electromagnetic momentum (see the Wiki article). On the other hand, the Lagrangian $T-U$ describing the motion of a lone particle in the EM field is $L = \tfrac{1}{2}m \left( \vec{v} \cdot \vec{v} \right) - qV + q\vec{A} \cdot \vec{v}$, yielding for the canonical momentum conjugate to co-ordinate $x$ the expression $p_x=\partial L/\partial \dot{x} = m\,v_x+q\,A_x$; likewise for $y$ and $z$ with $\dot{x}=v_x$. A subtle point here is that the "potential" $U$ is no longer the potential energy, but a generalized "velocity dependent potential" $q\,V-\vec{v}\cdot\vec{A}$. These canonical momentums are not in general conserved, they describe the evolution of the particle's motion under the action of the Lorentz force and, moreover, are gauge dependent (meaning, amongst other things, that they do not correspond to measurable quantities).

However, when one includes the densities of the four force on non-EM "matter" in the electromagnetic Lagrangian density, the Euler Lagrange equations lead to Maxwell's equations in the presence of sources and all the momentums, EM and those of the matter, sum to give conserved quantities.

Also note that the term "canonical momentum" can and often does speak about any variable conjugate to a generalized co-ordinate in an abstract Euler-Lagrange formulation of any system evolution description (be it mechanical, elecromagnetic or a even a nonphysical financial system) and whether or not the "momentum" correspond in the slightest to the mechanical notion of momentum or whether or not the quantity be conserved. It's simply a name for something that mathematically looks like a momentum in classical Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics, i.e. "conjugate" to a generalized co-ordinate $x$ in the sense of $\dot{p} = -\frac{\partial H}{\partial x}$ in a Hamiltonian formulation or $p = \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot{x}}$ in a Lagrangian setting. Even some financial analysts talk about canonical momentum when Euler-Lagrange formulations of financial systems are used! They are (as far as my poor physicist's mind can fathom) simply talking about variables conjugate to the generalized co-ordinates for the Black Schole's model. Beware, they are coming to a national economy near you soon, if they are not there already!