Monday, July 02, 2007

Deep Weirdness about Spin States

The consequences of half-integral spin are one of those things that, I always assumed, were mathematical and not physical. i.e. you learn that the identity operator for spin in quantum mechanics is 720 rotation, not 360 rotation. It seemed odd and, now I can see that it was simply explained to me wrong by a professor who (in retrospect) didn't understand it either. Why do you have to rotate twice to get back to zero?

Feynman not only understood it, but gives a very clever way of internalizing it.

He really was the best of his generation.

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