What Is Quantum Spin?

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Speaker 1: Ythaniel. Do you ever get caught using a word that you don't really understand? Do you actually always know what you're talking about? I don't think I'm willing to devote that here on the podcast, and maybe we can have that conversation over a beer sometimes. But the thing that I love is that there are some topics in physics, some idea, some words that I'm pretty sure nobody actually really understands. I feel like this is taking us to another episode about quantum physics that's right and wrong at the same time. No, I mean, yes, exactly what at the same time. Hi'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which we take crazy and fascinating and amazing and hot and wet and nasty things about the universe and try to explain them to you. Today's episode is dedicated to a Lana, whose boyfriend Nick is a local fan of the podcast here in Irvine. Happy Birthday, Alana. Today's topic is a really fun one, and in preparation for it. Not only did I go and do the normal street interviews I usually do with random people, but I actually went around the halls of my physics department and I asked a bunch of grad students if they could explain today's topic for me, and they found it pretty tough. Wow, that's a pretty interesting spin on the topic in our process. That's right, that's right to be on the podcast. We're going to be talking about quantum spin exactly. Quantum spin? What is it? What does it mean? Are things actually spinning? Why is it quantum um? We've got a lot of people sending in requests to talk about this topic. And I think when people are interested in physics and digging around in videos on the internet and listening to podcast you hear this come up a lot. It comes up in quantum entanglement, It's in science fiction everywhere, and of course people want to know what does it mean, what's going on? Why is it so important? That's right? What is spin? How fast is it spinning? What's the spin on it? Exactly? Is it's spinning out of control? That's right? Is it different from political spin? Um? It's definitely a thing, right, It's something fascinating and more importantly, if you're an expert in this field, does that make you a spin doctor doctor of spin? Yes, exactly. You know, we have sort of a bad track record in physics of naming things um naming things using familiar words, like we give corks flavors, right, the up cork and the charm cork and the top cork a different flavors of corks, colors and colors, right when they don't really have color, they don't really have color, and they don't really taste different. I mean, I don't know, I've never actually tasted a top cork, So there you go. I'm speaking on something I don't really understand, but we don't mean it in that way. So sometimes we're like adopting existing words and just using them totally inappropriately. Other times we're trying to use words that are similar to some other concepts because specifically because we want to call up structures and ideas from those concepts. Like color is actually a pretty cool one because while the particles are not colored, there's something about quantum color which is similar to color, and so we want to express that. You're sort of trying to grab onto an intuitive idea, even if you're trying to like a reference, you're trying to reference an intuitive idea in our everyday experience and and kind of latch that onto a physics concept exactly. And we do that all the time, right, That's basically what physics is is try to explain the unknown in terms of the known, right, Like when we try to talk about particles, we're doing that all the time. You know, we're saying, oh, it's a particle, No, it's a wave. Right, It's really neither, and it's both and it's something else more complicated, And we're just trying to patch together a description of using ideas in your head, right, we weave these together into some sort of understanding. Here's such a suggestion for you guys. Maybe you should just instead of calling being bold and calling it like colors or flavors, just at the word, like at the beginning in your official definition. So the announcement should be like, like we're calling this color, I mean, like let's call flavor. No, I just call it like a quantum light color. It's light color. It has a color like property or a spin like property, or you know, I mean, if you want to get mathematically, just with a little Tilda in the front right, and then nobody would be confused. Yeah, I like that idea a lot good. You like like it? Yeah, I totally like it, and I think, um, I hope on Twitter it gets a lot of likes. There you go. I think I want to something. I think I think you should be nominated onto the secret International Physics Naming Committee. I don't know where it meets or when it meets, or who's in charge of it, but they have been making some dubious decisions recently and they need some fresh blood. Well, I think if I was in charge, I would just put the tilt in front of physics itself. You know, what are you study till the physics? Physics? I'm studying something like physics, but it's not actually, I mean, isn't everything like physics? Pretty next thing, you're gonna be calling me like a physicist, not actually a physicist, but something like approximating a physicist. You know, you're gonna spread this Tilda Daniels sort of like a Daniel into it. Lee, You're Daniel. You know I'm actually a Daniel. I am the definition of me, right, You're Daniel sub zero exactly. I'm not like me I am me, right, you are, I think therefore I am Daniel. Well, anyways, before we spin out of control here on this um side conversation, um, we're talking about quantum spin, and so it's it. It plays a big deal in quantum physics and quantum entanglement, right, and atomic orbitals. I mean it's it's sort of it's important in everybody's atoms, which um which are a kind of important to people, that's right. I like my atoms, you know, they're not like atoms. I just like them. But exactly, spin is everywhere, and you hear come up, and especially when you're hearing explanations of quantum entanglement or quantum computing or or orbitals and this kind of stuff, you hear about it. And when I was a student and I was learning about quantum spin, I was like, okay, but what is it like? Are these things actually spinning? Why do we call it spin? Right? How could a particle spin? And so let's dig into all that today. Well, as usual, Daniel went out there and asked people in the street if they knew what quantum spin was. And you actually have kind of an interesting spin twid this time, right, Yeah, I went out and I asked people on the U C Irvine campus and then a few other folks at the at an Irvine mall Um what they thought quantum spin was, if they could describe it, and if they did understand quantum spin. I also asked them, are these particles actually spinning or is that just like spin? Is that just like a word we use. Well, here's what people had to say, um, so energy, I just think of energy. Oh yes, what's the quantum spin? Uh? Like quantum spin as an like spin up, spin down with within molecular orbitals and electrons um. So are those particles like actually spinning gesa Uh No, I haven't quantum spin? No? Uh yeah, it's electron spin um that it can be positive or negative um. And then how's it different from normal spin? Like a tennis ball can spin? Is electron spain the same thing? Are they physically spinning? Uh? I'm not sure. I know some stuff about Polly's principle that the spin should be in a specific way, and they're prepared, so I know some way in distunt stuff, but I'm not sure about the people. Right. Yeah, isn't because um every electron has a different type of spin. It's like either a plus one half a minus one half. I forgot what it would Yeah, and are they like actually spinning. Is it like the same thing as a tennis ball spinning? Or is it's um? No, because it's not like because you can't treat it like it's a particle, right, because it's um like an electron is a mix of a particle and a way. I've heard of it, but I'm not familiar with the meaning. Okay, No, I don't know what that is, all right. Yes, there's up and down spin, right, and it's in me. Uh well, I don't know much more than that, Okay, all right. It seemed very binary. Some people had had no idea, never even heard of it, and some people had a lot to say about this topic. Yeah, and some people knew some stuff sort of in the vicinity of the topic, but not actually like reluing to the question the vicinity. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I like when when I asked somebody question and I can tell they haven't thought about this in a long time, and they have sort of like a free association going off in their mind that wait, this is connected to that idea, to that idea of that idea, and then they go no, Actually, I don't know. I don't know the answer. That's really fun, but you can see their process. Yeah, because a lot of people to be heard about it or read about it a long time ago, maybe in high school physics or something, and so you sort used to feel like it's in there in your brain. You just need some time to you know, boot up the hard drives. Yeah, exactly. But I think my favorite part of this experience asking people these questions was that one gentleman after I asked him, um, if you knew about quantum spin, he then asked me, he said, is this some thing you need for your dissertation? Said yes, yes, sir, Yes, sir, I am a twenty five year old graduate student. Absolutely, are you saying that you can be a grad student at forty something? There are fewer of them. Yes, there are a few or forties something year old grad students. But I have to say the ones that are forty years old, like folks that went out into the real world and worked in real estate or law or something and then came back to do physics grad school, they're really good students. They really want it. Yeah, it takes a it's a lot of work to divert from a path in the real world back into academia. It's much harder than just like going from undergrad to grad school. So I really respect that. You know, you gotta really want it cool. So if there are any there, any listeners out there who want to change careers and get a PhD, they should contact you, right and you have a spot for them. I'm not sure I just offered anybody funding, but I would encourage you. If you have a deep passion for physics and you're finding yourself in a dead end job and you wish you had gone to physics grad school to unraveled mr of the universe, I encourage you, sir and ma'am, if you'd like to be in another dead end of of awesome knowledge, then be a cartoonist. Is that what you're gonna say? Yes? Yes, alright, So Daniel, let's break it down for people. What is quantum spin? We don't know? Done podcast over, why we had to diversely so much? Just do fill fill in the air time? Um, So people don't know because I don't know what quantum spin is. We don't really know what it is. Now we know it's a thing, right, So there's this thing, this property of particles. We don't really understand what it is, what it's doing. But there's this thing we've observed and we call it quantum spin. So let's do that. Let's talk about what this thing is that we can observe, and then we'll talk about why we call it quantum spin. And you know whether it's actually spinning and stuff. Right, Well, what's the origin of this? How did this come to be a thing? And it came to be a thing basically because of magnets, right, and you remember that charged particles. So a little particle with the charge on it, like an electron, if you move it in a circle, right, like through a wire loop or something, then it makes a magnetic field. Right, you can turn it on and off like electro magnets. This is how they work, right, like motors everyday electric motors, motors in your car and in your electric car, and you're um even your phone, right, there's probably a little motor of solenoid doing the vibrations when you put it on vibrate mode. That that's the principle. Like they just pump electrons through a coil a little loop, and then that creates a magnetic magnetic field which moves something. That's right. And the cute cool thing there is you have a magnet you can control electronically or digitally. So that's pretty awesome. But the important concept there is that things moving in a circle. Charges moving in a circle give you a magnetic field. Right, So that's something we know about, right, something we understand. And so then people were asking the question, um, well, do electrons themselves like individual particles? Do they have little magnets on them, like not just moving in a circle, but is there a magnetic field just due to the particle? And this is the kind of thing physicists do. They're like, well, we don't expect this to be this way, but let's just check, right, let's see if this happens. Because back then maybe they thought particles were like little little balls, right maybe yeah, well they didn't know. Right, this is in the nineteen twenties, this is almost a hundred years ago. The whole idea of a particle was still pretty new. People discovered electrons and neutrons and you know, it was a crazy era of discovery. They were maybe asking, like, is one electron maybe like a magnet itself? Yes, exactly right, And that's what they were wondering about. And so if it's a magnet, it would have a direction, right, like a field exactly what it have its own little magnetic field. So that was the question they were trying to answer, like does an electron or a silver atom or whatever, a little particle have its own magnetic field. So what they did is they built this device that would um that. Basically, they put particles in this device and the device has a magnet nick field on it, and they move the particles through the device, not in a circle, just in a straight line. And the idea is that the device has magnets in it. So if the particles have their own magnetic field, then they'll get pushed to one side because the magnets on the particle would interact with the magnets um from this device and would push the particles to one side or the other, kind of like like if you not through an electron, but if you through like an actual magnet, like a fridge magnet, if you threw it at some other magnets, it would get deflected, right, yeah, exactly, it would get deflected. Now, most magnets are balanced, right, Most magnets have a north and a south. So say you set up like a really strong pair of magnets and then you threw a fridge magnet through it, probably wouldn't get deflected because it has a north and a south, and so the polls would get balanced. So what they did was they set up one really big magnet and then a weaker magnet on the other side, so there's like an uneven magnetic field through it, so that if your fridge magnet goes through it, depending on the angle of the magnet, depending on the angle of the north and the south, they'll get pulled the one direction or the other. So they build the particle version of this, Right, They an uneven magnetic field, and they shot some particles through it, and what they found was really surprising, Right, it was really shocking what they discovered. They found that particles do have magnetic fields. Yeah. Well, first of all, they found two things that were surprising. One, particles do have their own little magnetic fields. I mean, first they did it with silver atoms, which is sort of the easiest thing they could do to to make a beam. Then this is a long time ago before you could easily make like a beam of particles. They just put a bunch of silver in an oven and like some of it boiled off and they collimated it and got a beam of silver atoms. And then later they did the same thing with electrons, and they found that these things have their own little magnets. Like an electron is a magnet, which is kind of perplexing, like what does that mean? Like where does this magnet come from? Right? But what does it mean that it's a magnet? Like if I just look at an electron, it has like a north and south poll to it. Yes, exactly. Electrons have their own little magnetic fields, even when they're not moving in a circle, even if they're not moving at all, Like if you suspended a like current, can you can you do it? Yeah? Yeah, exactly. If you have an electron just floating motionless in mid air, it will have its own little magnet. And that's really weird to us now, right, because we know that part of electrons and particles, they're not like little balls or just points. Yes, exactly, and so the question of where does that magnet come from? That's where this whole idea of spin came from. But the other really weird thing they found was that the magnets didn't point in every direction, Like if you just throw a bunch of magnets through this device, if they're all pointed in different directions. Right is just randomly oriented, you'd expect them to get deflected in random directions. This one goes left, this one goes right, this one goes a little bit up, this one goes a little bit down. But you know, if they're randomly organized, they should go in all sorts of directions, right, But what they found was that they either went left or they went right. There was not nothing in between, Like it's either left or right and nothing else, like, those are your two options, really, and no variations and how much right or how much left? Yeah, they all went exactly the same amount left or this exactly the amount right? What, Yeah, exactly. And that's why we call it quantum. Right, they have this little quantum magnetic field. The amazing thing is that, say, then you rotate the device, you're like, okay, rotated ninety degrees. Maybe you were measuring it on the X axis. Now you're measuring on the y axis, right, so you're imagining, okay, well, maybe these particles just you know, we're somehow weirdly oriented along the x axis, so they either go left or right. So then rotate your device ninety degrees. Then all the particles either move up or down right. No matter how you orient the device, the particles either go along the magnet or against it. Right. So it's not like a it's not like a real magnetic field, right, it's something weirder. It's not like a real magnetic field. Exactly like a magnetic it's like a magnetic field. And that's that's exactly where we what they struggled with. They're like, Okay, this has some property. It's something is generating this magnet, and it's definitely quantum mechanical in some weird way because we have all these weird properties. Like another weird thing about this magnetic devices. So you send a bunch of electrons through and you split them um left and right. Okay, then you take the left beam, only the left beam, and you split them through a device that's rotated ninety degrees that goes up and down. Then they split up and down right, even though beforehand they would only split left and right. Wait, what if you take the left beam, the one that the ones that went left? What if you try to split them up again? Horizontally. Do they all go left again, Yes, they do. But if you split them left right, and you take the left beam, then you split them up down, you take the upbeam, and then you try to split it left and right again, then they mix they go both left and right. And that's why it's quantum mechanical, yeah, because you can't you can't measure this weird little quantum magnet that the electron has. You can't measure it both in X and in y at the same time. It's the old Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can't know too much information about the universe. So when you measure it in up, down, it mixes it up again and left right. Whoa. It's like, oh, I see, you can't measure the up and down and the left and right at the same time. It's like them that you can't know a particle where it is and where it's going at the same time. The same thing applies to the magnet exactly. And that's how we knew it was a quantum mechanical property. Right, So we discovered this weird thing about particles that they have their own little magnets, and somehow this magnet is quantum mechanical, and so they were like, what could this be? All right, let's get into what it could be and some of the weird things about that. But first let's take a quick break, okay, Daniel. So people were measuring electrons and they found that they have sort of like an inherent and inherent magnet inside of electrons, and that it's quantum mechanical, meaning that it's like really weird and you can't measure up and down and left and right. That's right um, and so people that's why people decide to call quantum spin. Yeah, even though it's not really spinning, they just went for that name. That's right. They call it quantum spin. And so let's try to figure out what do they mean by quantum spin? What why did they call it quantum spin? Alright, Well, quantum is pretty straightforward. It's definitely it's a property of particles, and it behaves like other quantum things that you can't know too much about it at the same time or you can't measure the x and the y um direction of at the same time. And also it's either up or down, right, there's no in between, So it's quantized. So the quantum stuff all right, I buy it. Right, you should definitely call this quantum something. If you're gonna call it quantum spin or quantum banana, you know, that's another question. But it should definitely have the quantum label. Okay, Well, I feel like maybe they should have called it quantum pole or something, you know, like something that references that, because really you're trying to you're trying to capture this kind of the magnetic the direction of the magnetic field of the electron, right, which is kind of like the pole. Yeah, well, what they what they did is they thought about what generates magnetic polls, right, what generates magnetic fields. And we know that a particle moving in a circle, right, like orbiting for example, will generate a magnetic field. So then they thought, maybe the particle is spinning. Maybe it's like physically spinning. And if you imagine electron like it has charge on it, think about the surface of the electron has like little bits of its charge distributed across the surface. This is the image they had back then, not the image that we use now. If that was spinning, then you can imagine that the spinning surface of the electron could be basically particles moving in a circle and now would generate a magnetic field. So they were like, ah, maybe we've discovered that electrons can spin, right, but why didn't they just call it like quantum poles and that? Because because you were born a hundred years too late. Man, I know, that's what I'm saying. Totally. I'm officially nominating you to be on the Secret Physics Naming Committee. I think you're you're great at this. I mean in the sense of people out there who might be trying to understand, is you know, I mean they're enough is they don't really um care what they call it a perthennial thing. But if if they had called the quantum the quantum magnetic pole or something like that, would that still be accurate and also maybe be easier to understand. I don't think it's accurate because it's describing the effect and not the cause. Right. We think something is happening which generates the magnetic field and these other properties. But what we'd like to do is figure out what the cause of it is, Like, what is the particle doing that generates the magnetic field? Right? What is the source of it? And does that give us insight into other stuff? And um, it turns out it does. Right, If we like to think about the particles having this thing we call spin, and we call it spin because it generates the magnetic field, but also because the way the mathematics of the spin is really similar to the mathematics of electrons in orbit. M What do you mean it's similar? Well, the like the mathematical language we use to like to describe it is very very similar, right, And when you see it's like some phenomenon A and you describe it mathematically, and you see phenomenon being you describe mathematically and you notice how look they're described by the same math, then you have to wonder are they two sides of the same coin or are they really the same thing? And so people's people thought, oh, look at all this release relationships between quantum between this thing we call quantum spin and orbital angular momentum, you know, the angular momentum of something moving around in a circle. And it was a lot of connections there, but they turned out to be wrong, right, Like I know, I know we were trying to do, but you sort of missed kind of well, yes and no, right, that's the first way you think about quantum mechanics like theoretically it does work, Physically it doesn't. So like theoretically it does, it works in this beautiful, really deep way because um, what we know, for example, is that angular momentum is conserved. Right, Like momentum is this property of particles to keep going in the direction they're going. Angular momentum is property particles to keep spinning the way they were spinning, right, And we know that angler momentum is conserved. If you start something spinning, it's going to keep spinning until you stop it. Now, what's what's conserved is total angle momentum, not the anglementum of like one thing. So you spin a top right, and you can stop it by touching it against another top, which then takes its spin right. So the total spin of those two tops is conserved. Well, the fascinating thing is that while we don't know what spin is, we know that orribital, angular momentum and spin are conserved together, like the some of them is conserved, so you can change the spin of some particle and and it will influence its angular momentum. Right, what do you need to conserve is the some of those two things, which tells you that spin really is like a kind of angular momentum. Fundamentally, theoretically, these really are related thing, Like a particle has that kind of quite angular momentum, and so it's approble to call it spin. Yes, it's some kind of intrinsic angular momentum. Like you can transfer angular momentum from orbital from the orbital kind to the spin kind and back right, which tells you that they really are two kinds of the same thing, that in some way the division between them is just in our minds. It's just mathematical. Oh, I see, So you're saying it's some kind of spin, it's some kind of a rotation. Yes, exactly. So it's like spin. It's like spin exactly. And so it's really I got you, I got you. Yeah, you admit it on air that horror Chand was right. They should be called like spin. It should be called like spin. I completely in totally agree with you. There you go. But I guess that the question is, like, so they called they decided to call it spin because it's sort of like it, like real spin. But I guess the question is are these particles actually spinning? Right? And that's the fascinating part is that they can't I mean particles are points, right, they have no volume. We were talking earlier about the idea of a particle with a surface and maybe bits of it on the surface we're spinning like the surface was rotating and the bits of charge removing in a circle to generate a magnetic field. That's hogwash, Like that can't happen because particles don't have a size. Right, Electronics, as far as we know, has zero size. Like the one side of it is exactly the same place as the other side of it, so there's nothing to spin. You can't turn around a point and has no direction. It's like a vector of zero length, Like there's no the distance between one end of the particle and the other end of the particle for them to be sort of moving at different in different directions. Right, exactly because it's a point particle. Yeah, you spin the particle and it's exactly the same as it was before. Right, there's no direction to it. Right, But what isn't it kind of maybe a philosophical question, like maybe a particle a point can't spin? Who's is a point can't spin? You just can't see it. I just said it. That's not enough for you. I'm only a like physicist. You're liked. You're well liked, Daniel. Um. No, imagine a imagintive vector right, imagintive vector right, which is a length and a direction. Okay, Um, that can spin right, you can turn it ninety degrees or degrees or whatever like an arrow. Like an arrow exactly. But if an arrow has zero length, what direction is it pointing in the one that I told, the one that it decides to have. I don't know this quantum stuff. No, it has no directive, has no length. It can't have a direction, right, because the direction would imply a length. Right, But you're sort of telling me that it does kind of have a direction, right, It kind of has like spin, Yeah, it has some property. It can't spin physically, like, it can't spin in the way that we would spin a tennis ball. Right. It definitely cannot do that. Also, these other problems, like if you imagine an electron, if you say, well, we don't really know. Maybe an electron does have a size, right, you haven't seen it. It maybe does. Well, you know, if you say, we know the size of electron has to be less than like ten to the minus twenty meters, because that's the most best resolution we have we have on our biggest particle accelerators, and then you calculate, like, well, how fast would the service the electron be spinning? Will it be spinning faster than the speed of light? So it's definitely not happening. And these are not tiny, little actually spinning balls, right. But this always happens when we try to describe something quantum mechanical in terms of something that's not right. You have the tennis ball or the baseball spinning in your head and you're trying to use that as a model, and it works for a while until it doesn't. And it doesn't work because this thing is not a tiny ball, right, It's some weird thing and it has some weird property. The amazing thing is this spin property is really similar to this other thing we do understand, right. I think maybe the problem is that you're saying that um like precision wise, like where it's constituent matter is can't rotate in space, right, But you're saying that it has other properties other than position of its constituent matter that do sort of have a preferred direction. Yes, exactly, it has. That's why we call it intrinsic spin because it has some property which is very similar mathematically to spin, but we know it's not actually spinning. So like intrinsic is like is the physics version of like right, because well, it's intrinsic spin. It's like some kind of spin. Right, So you're saying that that it's a point, but it is kind of spinning. I'm saying it's a point and it has some weird property which is related to physical spin, but it's not. But mathematically it's kind of equivalent. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. It's really quite fascinating, and you know it's amazing too. It's to look at the history because they did these experiments in twenties and the twenties was also when they were figuring out quantum mechanics, like they're like, how does this thing work? And they're still trying to put the math together. And when they were trying to put together the math for relativistic quantum mechanics, I was like the quantum mechanics of tiny particles moving really fast, they discovered it didn't work. It only worked if you added some new hidden variable to the electrons, like there had to be two kinds of them, not just anti particles and particles, but every electron also had to have this other weird hidden property and then they called it spin, and it's the same. It turned out to be the same spin that the other physics we're looking at, Yes, exactly. It all converged beautifully, and they were like to ching, look at this, Oh my god, it all makes sense now we understand those experiments, right, and so you need spin, like quantum mechanics doesn't work without spin, Like the Lorenz group and quantum field theory, all that has has been deeply built inside of it, so we know it's a thing and theoretically it makes sense. Do you mean it needed like a hidden variable? What does that mean? Like it needed needing it like an extra space, like an extra variable attached to it for the math to like. Yeah, think about an electron is having labels, right, like it has certain mass, that has a certain position, has certain direction whatever. Every electron also has to have this other label. You know, it's either up or down. Right, Remember this is spin, so it's not like you're spinning at some random speed. It's quantum spin. So there's only two options up or down. And so every electron has to have this weird label you're spinning up or you're spinning down, and that makes a difference, like when you fill out atomic orbitals. Right, No, two electrons can be in the same orbital because their fermions they don't like to share. But an electron that spin up is different from an electron that spin down. So you can have two electrons in the ground state because they have this weird sort of hidden thing that's different about them, like black on the red or it's like the exception to the probably exclusion, right, it's like it lets you go around it, right. It's why you can have two atoms in the ground state where otherwise the poll exclusion principle, well tell you can't. It's because, well, they're not really in the ground state. There's two ground states. You can have a ground state for up and a ground state for down. Right, But it's not really up and down, right, it's only up and down if you measure it up and down. It's up and down along whatever direction you measure. So if you measure it in X, every electron will say I'm up or I'm down. If then you measure it in why, every electron will say, oh, I'm up or I'm down, but they get mixed up. Right, So there are the quantum mechanically confusing because they're either up or down in X and then later your upper down and why which makes misses up your upper downness and X. It's very complicated. So you're saying that electrons can like talk essentially it's a way to communicate. Yeah, um. And and this is why um. This comes up all the time in like quantum computing, because you can use electrons as sort of a cube bit. Right is it spin up or is it spin down? Electron can be in two states and it's like a nice map from a classical bit which is zero or one. So these quantum mechanical properties are nice because they have two states. Right, So electrons are spin up or spin down. Um. So that's why it comes up all the time. And also in quantum entanglement, like you you have some particle, create two electrons, well to conserve anglo momentum, one has to be spin up and one has to be spinned down. Oh really Yeah, when you when you create them out of nothing or out of something else, they can they can't both come out the same spin. Yeah. Well, for example, z bosons can have spin zero. WHOA, what does that even mean, Daniel? It has no things, which is not really like spin. It's actually it's actually even more complicated. Z Bosons have a total spin of one. That's like the length of their spin. But this is a vector, so it can point in different directions, which means they have three waves to spin. So particles like electrons are called spin one half particles. They have one half of a unit to spin, which means they can be spin up one half or down one half. Z Bosons have spin one, right, so they can be spinned plus one or minus one or zero. So z bosons have three different ways to spin, whereas electrons have two ways to spin. It's pretty weird it considered like spin one way or the other way or not at all. Yes, exactly. But if you have a z boson with spin zero and it decays into an electron and a positron, then one of them has to be spin up and the other one has to be spinned down so that they add up to the original angular momentum of the z boson, which was zero. What if a plus one then it turns into an electron and a positron which are spinning in the same direction. So they add those two one halves add up to one. I'm gonna pretend I understood that. Well, that's the cool thing about it is that the math of this is really similar. You can use all the math you developed for like angler momentum and understanding spin orbitals and stuff like that, you can use that same math to understands been which is really compelling to me. Tells me that theoretically we're dealing with a very similar topic, right, or maybe the math we had to understand angular momentum matches the physics of quantum particles, right, yes, exactly when the Mathew describing matches the physics, then that success, right, that says, oh, look I've described it. I've gotten some inside. I mean, that's all we can ever do writ is hope that the math describes the physics, right, You know what I mean is like um, maybe maybe if you hadn't called it spin, you called it quantum blukity book, right, and then reconsidering nominating you for that committee after that? What do you have against the blukaty books? I don't even know how to spell it anyway. All right, So let's say we had quantum blukaty blok. Yeah, and then later you find out that angular momentum behaves like quantum blukity bluk, then that would be which one would be more correct? Right? We don't work correct? Well, if you're using the same math for both of them, then you're done. And there it's really just a question of how you name it. Right. In the end, it's the math, right, Then the physics is really about the math and not the names. In the end, it's about the equations on the paper and and and they're the structures and however about it. So really you could have called it anything, but you picked spin because it's sort of related to something that we people had knowledge about, or people have kind of intuitive understanding about, that's right, And because we think it really is a kind of angular momentum. What kind is it? And are these things really spinning? And why do electrons have intrinsic angle momentum? That we have no idea, but it seems to be necessary to make quantum field theory work. It seems to be a kind of angular momentum. It's definitely a real thing, but it's kind of a mystery, and it's something I like to think about like, why are you doing the electron, why are you spinning this way? What? What is making you generate that magnetic field? Yeah, exactly exactly, Well I guess so. And then the answer is what it's quantum? Say, it's um. It's some property of electrons um that sort of behaves similar to rotation. But we don't really know what it is, but it's there, it's real, and it's definitely not actually spinning. And it's not just electrons, right, All particles have some kind of spin. There's particles with half integer spin we call them fermions, and all the matter particles and like that, electrons and quarks, and then there's particles with integer spin, like bosons, like photons and ws and zs and gluons and those kind of particles. And that's actually the way we distinguish them. Right, Fermions have half endeger spin and bosons have integer spin. So it's a it's a it's an important deal. Like in the particle world, it's a big deal. Right, And you meet a new particle, you want to know what is its spin. The Higgs, for example, is spin zero. It's the only particle we know that has no spin at all and never can spin. It's the only particle we've ever found that can never spin. Wow, now you're just messing with basic arithmetic. Man. You're like, if it's zero, can only be zero. If it's one, it can be zero when mine is you know what I mean, Like you're using the same words to describe things that means anyways, Okay, I should be more careful when I say what it means for a particle have a certain amount of spin. When we say a particle spin one, what we mean is that the length of its spin vector is one, and that vector can point in different directions, and the individual particle can have spin plus one, zero or minus one if it's a spin one particle. If a particle spin one half, that's like the length of its spin vector, then it's spin vector con point either plus one half or minus one half. Those guys can't be zero. It's like, it's like arithmetic. It's not really Yeah, that's what I mean. It would just be so much easier to understand, you guys if you just said, instead of saying it's quantum spin, it's it's like spin. All right, I'm gonna say it's like spin from now on, and we'll see how many weird eyebrow races I get in my physics conversations. Yeah, totally. Well you'll probably get weird eyebrows in your physics department. But I'm saying, if you're talking to people out there in the street, are you suggesting there's like more unibrows in the physics department than in your average street more unibrows, one weird eyebrows man. All right, well, that's what quantum spin is. I know it's confusing and it's complicated, but we hope we at least brought you up to speed to where the physics community is. And remember, even physicists, we don't really know what quantum spin is. And all those grad students I asked, what, how would you explain quantum spin to a random person on the street, They got themselves tangled up and by their tongues as well. So it's a confusing topic. But if you still have questions about quantum spin, send us an email to feedback at Daniel and Jorne dot com. That's right. You can even send us like emails or like questions or emails that about how much you like us. See you next time. If you still have a question. After listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.