[Dihydrogen Monoxide]

I know spin is weird. Light is plenty weird.

I'm curious if on the road to Quantis (that technological paradise rumored to have existed in the Quantic Ocean) we didn't forget our slide rules back in Athens. Or maybe it was scissors.

What I mean is we haven't tried everything.

Fermions have half spins. They tend to deflect each other whereas bosons go through each other.

Suppose spin isn't something intrinsic at all but a relative concept, yet still related to rotation (or revolution).

I'm thinking about the fact that an electron has to go through two cycles to reach the same state as before. Suppose that an electron "spins" half as fast as the proton it is bound to. That is to say it takes two electron cycles for the electron-proton system to look the same.

I know the textbooks say we are talking about the electron not the proton, however when there's a confounding property that one thing cannot have, then logic requires us to consider a model involving multiple specimens does it not?

I know the proton also has a 1/2 spin, though I don't know to what it would be relative to. Maybe the quarks are spinning.

The thing that gives me hope though is that the Stanley Gerlach experiment is impossible for free electrons. Electrons don't break into bands when they pass through a magnetic field.

Perhaps free electrons don't have spin. The suggests perhaps a relative definition of spin in terms of revolution. Orbital angular momentum is like position and spin like distance between two positions.

It would be interesting to see if this is a fundamental concept that can be extended to classical systems as well.

[Profpat]

The proton has an intrinsic spin; classically one could think of the analogy of a rotating top. How can we understand this spin in terms of the quarks inside the proton? The simplest idea is to trace the proton spin directly back to the spin of the quarks (the quarks also have a spin; this is a fundamental and well understood property of quarks).

Naive model of the proton spin. According to this model, the proton spin is the result of the spins of the three quarks.

I think the proton spin is still under investigation but I thought the above may be of interest to you.

[Dihydrogen Monoxide]

The spins of the quarks cancel out leaving one 1/2 spin.

Is there any reason to suppose that quarks have no orbit just spin?

Can the gluon soup collect in the center as a colorless mass around which the quarks might orbit?

[dleviwing]

Your quite right DM; fee electrons are significantly different than those captured by a proton or even those traveling through a wire or semiconductor junctions.

The gluon soup is usually called energy states or bands.

[Dihydrogen Monoxide]

Originally Posted by dleviwing Your quite right DM; fee electrons are significantly different than those captured by a proton or even those traveling through a wire or semiconductor junctions. The gluon soup is usually called energy states or bands.

How deep in math do I need to go to understand what goes on in a gluon soup?
Tensors?