Aug 16, 2025 08:18 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 16, 2025 10:26 PM by Magical Realist.)
Speaking intuitively, there is just something downright magical about rotation and spinning. The way it generates forces like magnetism and electrical charge and angular momentum and centrifugal force and even gravity waves.. Its binary nature as either clockwise or counterclockwise. It's rotational symmetry. And the fact that it is basically a type of what I'd call "non-Newtonian" motion that doesn't change location and is entirely relative to itself--to the axis around which it spins. No wonder it is a property like charge that while explaining so much, is not itself understood at all!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...come-from/
"Electrons are proficient little magicians. They seem to flit about an atom without tracing a particular path, they frequently appear to be in two places at once, and their behavior in silicon microchips powers the computing infrastructure of the modern world. But one of their most impressive tricks is deceptively simple, like all the best magic. Electrons always seem to spin. Every electron ever observed, whether it's just ambling around a carbon atom in your fingernail or speeding through a particle accelerator, looks like it's constantly doing tiny pirouettes as it makes its way through the world. Its spinning never appears to slow or speed up. No matter how an electron is jostled or kicked, it always looks like it's spinning at exactly the same speed. It even has a little magnetic field, just like a spinning object with electric charge should. Naturally, physicists call this behavior “spin.”
But despite appearances, electrons don't spin. They can't spin; proving that it's impossible for electrons to be spinning is a standard homework problem in any introductory quantum physics course. If electrons actually spun fast enough to account for all of the spinlike behavior they display, their surfaces would be moving much faster than the speed of light (if they even have surfaces at all). Even more surprising is that for nearly a century, this seeming contradiction has been written off by most physicists as just one more strange feature of the quantum world—nothing to lose sleep over.
Yet spin is deeply important. If electrons didn't seem to spin, your chair would collapse down to a minuscule fraction of its size. You'd collapse, too—and that would be the least of your problems. Without spin, the entire periodic table of elements would come crashing down, and all of chemistry would go with it. In fact, there wouldn't be any molecules at all. So spin isn't just one of the best tricks that electrons pull; it's also one of their most crucial. And like any good magician, electrons haven't told anyone how the trick is done. But now a new account of spin may be on the horizon—one that pulls back the curtain and shows how the magic works..." --cont'd in article
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...come-from/
"Electrons are proficient little magicians. They seem to flit about an atom without tracing a particular path, they frequently appear to be in two places at once, and their behavior in silicon microchips powers the computing infrastructure of the modern world. But one of their most impressive tricks is deceptively simple, like all the best magic. Electrons always seem to spin. Every electron ever observed, whether it's just ambling around a carbon atom in your fingernail or speeding through a particle accelerator, looks like it's constantly doing tiny pirouettes as it makes its way through the world. Its spinning never appears to slow or speed up. No matter how an electron is jostled or kicked, it always looks like it's spinning at exactly the same speed. It even has a little magnetic field, just like a spinning object with electric charge should. Naturally, physicists call this behavior “spin.”
But despite appearances, electrons don't spin. They can't spin; proving that it's impossible for electrons to be spinning is a standard homework problem in any introductory quantum physics course. If electrons actually spun fast enough to account for all of the spinlike behavior they display, their surfaces would be moving much faster than the speed of light (if they even have surfaces at all). Even more surprising is that for nearly a century, this seeming contradiction has been written off by most physicists as just one more strange feature of the quantum world—nothing to lose sleep over.
Yet spin is deeply important. If electrons didn't seem to spin, your chair would collapse down to a minuscule fraction of its size. You'd collapse, too—and that would be the least of your problems. Without spin, the entire periodic table of elements would come crashing down, and all of chemistry would go with it. In fact, there wouldn't be any molecules at all. So spin isn't just one of the best tricks that electrons pull; it's also one of their most crucial. And like any good magician, electrons haven't told anyone how the trick is done. But now a new account of spin may be on the horizon—one that pulls back the curtain and shows how the magic works..." --cont'd in article
