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Originally Posted by scourge
Excuse me if I jump in to ask a question that has tortured me for years--does anyone know what that spin rate actually is, in terms of actual rotation/frequency? I don't get what the whole h-bar thing really means, in explicit physical terms. Thanks!
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Originally Posted by JMB
Classical mechanics works well, except to compute the energies of small sets of particles. On the contrary, the PRINCIPLES of quantum mechanics lead to absurdities (the paradoxes), or numerical errors ( the spontaneous emission is twice larger than the result of quantum mechanics; it is impossible to define a wave function for the photon...).
Quantum mechanics says that it solves the wave particle duality leaving the physicist choose arbitrarily what he likes (or remain in the vague, the users of quantum electrodynamics using optical modes which are not defined).
The solitons solve this problem, giving a mathematical support to the "double solution". of de Broglie.
The FORMALISM of quantum mechanism works well, but it may be considered as a phenomenology, valuable as well in a classical scheme than using the absurd principles of QM.
At the beginning, de Broglie and Schrödinger introduced waves to compute the energies, but it is equivalent and much easier to use Lie algebra; the spin becomes a mathematical concept which is not easily physically explanable.
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I was afraid you'd say that.
But here's where that seems like a dodge to me--we have precisely calculated and utilized the -precession- of the proton magnetic moment, the basis of MRI technology, so why can't we figure out the rate of the inherent spin? If we know the charge on the proton, and the magnitude of its magnetic field, why can't we determine the rate of rotation?
What has been said above sounds like 'we know it's a precise number that doesn't change, but we don't have any idea what it is,' or maybe 'we say 'spin,' but it's not really spin, it's something somehow related but different.' What gives? It seems that if protons are spinning, it would be extremely important to understand how fast.