Is it literally like the electron is rotating super fast, or something more complicated?
In: Physics
Spin is a property that things have. Kind of like “electric charge.” If you have something, such as an electron, it has this property that helps describe how it behaves. Two different electrons with a different value for their ‘spin’ behave in different ways (ish).
*Mathematically* this abstract property behaves kind of like spinning. Things either ‘spin’ one way or the other way, and their ‘spin’ can have different magnitudes. If you stick two things together their ‘spins’ “combine” in a similar way to how physical spinning works. So we call this property ‘spin.’ We could call it other things instead; we could call it “feeling” or anything we want to.
It isn’t actually spinning. With fundamental particles (such as – probably – electrons) they have no size, no dimension, so they physically cannot spin. They just have this property that acts, mathematically, like spinning. Except when we get into quantum mechanics the distinction between “actually is” and “acts mathematically like” becomes a bit blurry, so some things we would expect to see from spinning particles (like magnetic interactions) we see from ‘spin’.
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