2 ms·

My physics teacher said that spin is not necessarily rotation, more of a mathematical metaphor.

• hansen 16y ago
  It actually can't be rotation, otherwise the magnetic moment of charged particles comes out wrong by a factor two. From the mathematicians point of view spin arises naturally when you study how to represent the symmetries of special relativity. Quantum mechanics taught us that a physical state is represented by something called the "wave function". Different observers (e.g. one moving relatively to the other with constant speed) see different "wave functions" representing the same state. Studying all mathematically consistent possibilities of how to calculate what one observer sees if you know what the other sees leads to the possibility of particles with spin.
• pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  Spin refers to both intrinsic spin angular momentum and orbital angular momentum, http://books.google.com/books?id=3_7uriPX028C&lpg=PA31&pg=PA80#v=onepage&q=spin&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=3_7uriPX028C&lpg=PA31&#.... I think of intrinsic spin in part as being an ability to impart an angular momentum (magnets, how do they work!?), though I'm not sure how well that really works in practise it's just my mental model. Also it's interesting to speculate about charge-spin separation in electrons (spinons, holons). I have a pet (completely unworked) hypothesis that spin somehow exists across dimensions we experience and other dimensions - that the property could be a coupling with a "spining" (or spin) particle in a dimension outside Minkowski spacetime.