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CRC Press eBooks

Spin

Published Aug 1, 2003• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Goudsmit, Samuel A. It was a little over fifty years ago that George Uhlenbeck and I introduced the concept of spin. . . It is therefore not surprising that most young physicists do not know that spin had to be introduced. They think that it was revealed in Genesis or perhaps postulated by Sir Isaac Newton, which most young physicists consider to be about simultaneous.

DOI
10.1201/9781420034677-152

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•Jun 25, 2024•0 citations
Goudsmit, Samuel A. It was a little over fifty years ago that George Uhlenbeck and I introduced the concept of spin. . . It is therefore not surprising that most young physicists do not know that spin had to be introduced. They think that it was revealed in Genesis or perhaps postulated by Sir Isaac Newton, which most young physicists consider to be about simultaneous.
‘Spin’ considers the movement of electrons orbiting around the nucleus of an atom. Physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli, Pieter Zeeman, Ralph Kronig, George Uhlenbeck, Samuel Goudsmit, Llewellyn Thomas, Otto Stern, and Walther Gerlach spent many years trying to solve the puzzle of electron spin through different experiments. The mathematical theory of spin began to be developed in the 1920s, but it was the work of Paul Dirac in 1928 that solved the problem. By fusing relativity and quantum mechanics, the two great products of the early 20th-century revolution in physics, Dirac had assembled an equation that describes the origin of spin, the fundamental element of the magnetism of the electron.
This article is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics, and in particular to electron spin Ð a phenomenon that has no counterpart in classical physics.The hypothesis of electron spin was proposed by Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit in 1925±1926 to explain numerous experimental data.Two years later, Dirac discovered the existence of electron spin when constructing the relativistic wave equation for a free particle.This came as a great surprise to Dirac, since, as he later claimed (in 1977), his goal was to obtain a relativistic wave equation for the simplest particle, which he considered to be a particle with zero spin.But it turned out that the simplest particle is one with spin 1a2.
Abstract This chapter gets into the heart of the discovery of spin in physics as physicists try to make sense of the atomic spectra with the discovery of the anomalous Zeeman effect by Thomas Preston before the dawn of the twentieth century as Nature gave the first signal of the existence of quantum spin. Following Bohr, Sommerfeld, and Lande’s contributions with integers and then half-integers, quantum numbers make appearances, and after Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit’s ground-breaking contributions, physicists finally embrace the idea that electron spins. Pauli’s introduction of quantum spin with Pauli matrices provided a non-relativistic theory of the quantum spin. Hestenes argues that spin is not intrinsically related to Pauli matrices, and contrary to conventional wisdom, he advocates the view that the spin is very much present in the non-relativistic quantum physics.