A teacher told me that electron don’t even really ‘spin’ the way we understand spin. But somehow they can have angular momentum. And what exactly is the concept of half spin?
In: Physics
“Spin” is the term for intrinsic angular momentum of quantum particles. Since the electron is considered a point particle in the Standard Model it cannot really be spinning in a classical sense. We don’t really know more than that about how it arises.
The “units” of spin come from how many turns you need to make to bring the system back to its original state. “Normal” macroscopic objects all return to the same state after 1 full revolution, as do photons and other particles, but for electrons, they actually require 2 full revolutions, so they have 1/2 spin.
Like a lot of quantum mechanics, the math shows these properties, but we don’t know and/or can’t agree on how to interpret the math in terms of stuff that makes intuitive sense to humans.
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