Today’s post is my first attempt at understanding spin, so bear with me if I make mistakes. On the other hand, it just might be that most visitors to this blog are here for the picture. In this case, I might be able to say anything without anyone noticing. However, I write this at least as much for myself as I do for others.
Anyhow, let’s ger back to business. What is spin? According to Wikipedia:
Spin is an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles.
Also:
Spin should not be conceptualized as involving the "rotation" of a particle's "internal mass", as ordinary use of the word may suggest: spin is a quantized property of waves.
However, this doesn’t mean that spin couldn’t be the sum of rotations of the masses of the dots (elementary particles of energy). The Wikipedia article shows a Schematic diagram of the spin of a neutron:
Which, when imagined as a three-dimensional object does seem to describe a property that could be depicted with one more helix.
Of course, neutron and a quark are not the same, and the images found for the spin of quark do look a bit confusing:
Then again, the model shown above might be of the real interplay between quarks and my model is still a very simple ‘lie-to-children’. But you must begin somewhere. So how would I describe the angular momentum of a double-helical closed string? By adding an otherwise identical helix around the string depicting the actual dots, but with a larger radius to exaggerate the movement of the dots:
This makes for a cool-looking picture. The only problem is that the tight twisting of the double helix around itself means that the entangled string cannot move freely.
The primary movement must be along the string, which is actually quite a pain to illustrate:
But it could indeed be that angular momentum isn’t about this primary movement. Rather, it’s about the string moving in a secondary helical path:
Which would mean that the first of the three images is roughly correct after all.
So, this is roughly what spin is. However, these are too early days for me to say anything more concrete. Anyhow, I’m again pleasantly surprised that just like the existence of quarks, spin comes naturally from the Theory of Everything. Nothing had to be forced into the theory.
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