In today’s post I ask the question “why there is spin”? While I already have an intuitive feeling about the answer, I don’t yet know how to put the concept into very eloquent words. But let’s give it a try.
A particle with zero spin is a double helix with a single secondary turn. It is understood that helium atom has zero spin. And so does a Higgs boson, the ‘god particle’ that is said to give mass to particles. If my intuition is correct, the Higgs boson is double-helical donut with a single secondary turn, whereas helium atom has a more complex shape. But I could be wrong. This is very early in my thought process on the matter.
So, what is different with particles with non-zero spin? There are more secondary turns. For a while I wasn’t sure what these secondary turns mean physically, in terms of the motion of the dots, but now I think I know. If one imagines a state frozen in time, one only observes the motion of dots along the secondary helix.
In the image below, there are nine secondary helices, meaning that the dots would rotate nine times around the donut, as they go around their orbit.
and a close-up:
But I think they actually don’t. Rather the helix turns around to offset these extra rotations. This is a very difficult concept to clarify, but it basically again involves introducing a rotational component to the movement of dots. In the image above the movement along the secondary turn is depicted with a black helix, while the rotational component is depicted with a yellow helix. The green helix depicts the arrangement of the dots.
If the image was depicted correctly, the yellow helix would both have an inverse direction of rotation to the black helix (which is has in the image) and the angle at the point of intersection between black and yellow helices should have a 90 degree angle (which it doesn’t have, because it takes time to get it right).
So, the sum of the tangential and rotational components should produce an orbital of a single dot which should have a spin of zero. This means that an individual dot follows an orbital that indeed only has a single secondary turn. Like this image from the Theory of Everything -manuscript:
I’m sure this post is still a bit vague. Hopefully in the coming days I should be able to first understand the concept myself a bit better. After that I should be able to explain it to you.
And if the above image from the Theory of Everything -manuscript indeed depicts a Higgs boson, I might even be able to say something useful about it.
Or then again, I might be wrong. Only time will tell.
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