rotation of electron
- From: georgie <gderise@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 03:32:41 +0000 (UTC)
When Feynman was at Cornell while eating lunch in the cafeteria he
observed a student throwing a plate and noticed that the blue school
logo spun around faster than the wobble of the plate. For the fun of it
he worked out the equation of motion which showed that if the wobble is
small the blue logo goes around twice as fast as the wobble. When asked
why he was doing this he responded, "It hasn't any use. I'm just
doing it for the fun of it."
Feynman: "and I started to play with this rotation, and the rotation
led me to a similar problem of the rotation of an electron according to
Dirac's equation, and that just led me back into quantum
electrodynamics, which was the problem I had been working on."
(From: No Ordinary Genius, The Illustrated Richard Feynman.
Christopher Sykes. Norton. 1994 p.72.)
This seems like it's related to spinors but I can't find any
reference to this "rotation" of the electron in any of my QFT
books. Any comments?
Georgie
.
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