[sdiy] OT: The spin of electrons!

[Magnus Danielson]

karl dalen wrote:
> I have this book size of a brick by Brian Greene, The elegant universe,
> supposed to be more on the pedagogic side of explaining strings etc.
> Read it twice. Lots of physicists believe in the allmighty creator
> but most biologists does not!
> 
> Peculiar!
> 
>> David Ingebretsen <dingebre at 3dphysics.net>
>>
>> Electrons are neither round, nor solid, nor do they
>> necessarily even have a
>> shape or size. String theory would treat them as vibrating
>> "strings" or even
>> a P-Brane, where "P" means a Brane (or membrane) of some
>> higher dimension
>> which partially vibrates in our 4 dimensional time-space
>> and partially in
>> other dimensions which collapsed right after the big bang.
>>
>> They don't "spin" nor do they orbit the nucleus in the way
>> Bohr's model
>> suggests. They are a wave function which is modeled by a
>> probability.
> 
>> Schrödinger's wave equation is what is used to study
>> particles
>> theoretically. As my quantum teacher once joked (if we
>> physicists can
>> actually joke) "there are an infinite number of solutions
>> to the equation,
>> but only a few which are physically interesting. 
> 
> Thats in line with the impression Greene gives that nothing in
> string theory are a definitive truth, but its fun to speculate! :-)

String theory is just that, a theory. It combines the fun of abstract 
math with the fun of abstract physical models. Still they fail to 
completely model the hyperfine resonance of Hydrogen while the 
experimentalists have measured it into many more digits than the best 
theoretical number has been able to reach.

>> The best you can say about an electron is that it is
>> probably there and
>> probably moving this fast.
> 
> I now read that magnetism are interaction
> between charged particle/fields and photons? huh!?

Yes... photons are nice little particles...

>> Spin is a bookkeeping quantity. It has no real physical
>> meaning, just like
>> color for a quark.
> 
> Dark matter grayish? :)

Dont laugth at them. They tried hard to bring some colour into the field 
  after the dark ages. The last joke before that was Quantum Electro 
Dynamics (QED), but the joker in question got a price for it, so its OK 
I guess. Yeah, he got to play his bongo-drums on the TV. That Feynman 
bloke was in it for the laugths...

>> Even at absolute zero, an electron will still possess
>> energy.
> 
> Witch brings up an old DIY question, does current flow at zero volts?

On average no, if you measured your volts properly. Eventually they will 
change the definition of an Ampere from a very constructed theoretical 
description into being based on the number of element charges passing a 
cross-section per second.

Cheers,
Magnus