I've been snacking on #physics tutorials (mostly on youtube) for a few years now and I keep finding cases where initially there was a paradox or controversy, but over time it was basically solved, but everyone still thinks or acts like the controversy is still live. "Wave-particle duality" is one (there is no duality: particles are waves, and wavefunction collapse is bonkers, the end) and "Spin isn't spin!" is another...

Back during lockdown when I was watching #PBSSpaceTime and #ScienceAsylum and #Sabine and learning about Stern-Gerlach apparatuses and quantum erasers and such, my explanation of "it acts like it's spinning, but it's not spinning!" (after plenty of pondering) was "well maybe it's spinning through an extra dimension, or it's connected to something that's spinning around it that we can't see, like the EM field"

and my armchair visualization was: picture a spinning top, whose point touches a table, and that table is Flatland: in 3D it's clearly spinning but in 2D it's a point (or at least its point is too small to measure, thank Planck) so you can't see the spin but it's there -- so the classical objection "it's impossible for a point to spin!" evaporates, and our visual-thinker brains have something to work with like the mathemagicians' brains already do

So I was confused that this "new proposal" for quantum spin is new, since anyone could have imagined this at any time since 1928:

```
"“The electron is ordinarily thought of as a particle,” he says. “But in quantum field theory, for every particle, there’s a way of thinking about it as a field.” In particular, the electron can be thought of as an excitation in a quantum field known as the Dirac field, and this field may be what carries the spin of the electron. “There’s a real rotation of energy and charge in the Dirac field,” Sebens says. If this is where the angular momentum resides, the problem of an electron spinning faster than the speed of light vanishes; the region of the field carrying an electron’s spin is far larger than the purportedly pointlike electron itself. So according to Sebens, in a way, Pauli and Lorentz were half-right: there isn’t a spinning particle. There’s a spinning field, and that field is what gives rise to particles."
```
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-particles-arent-spinning-so-where-does-their-spin-come-from/

I'm not claiming that my visualizations are solving any actual physics problems, just that physics communicators are prone to throwing up their hands and saying "nobody can explain it!" when actually, um, really? cause here's an imperfect but useful explanation off the top of my head; maybe if you mathed it out it could make some testable predictions or simplify some theorems, or maybe it's just an analogy, but either way it's not nothing

Are physics profs these days saying "so picture a spinning top (where the electron is the tip/center)" to explain #spin (which is probably wrong but also useful), just like they all still say "picture a basketball on a rubber sheet" to explain #GeneralRelativity (which is definitely wrong, and only arguably useful since it uses gravity to explain gravity)? cause most of the lecturers I see end up repeating "It can't be spin! It's too small to spin!" and shrug at the possibility of useful analogies

[Shut up and calculate!](https://www.nature.com/articles/505153a)

yes, "spin 1/2" is weird but that's fine; picture a car racing along a Möbius strip but we can only see along the finish line; every lap it flips so it needs two laps to get back to the top of the track; now map that track onto the edge of the invisible spinning top

i know, hindsight is 20/20, everything is obvious once you see it, so I'm not *really* confused but still vaguely discomfited

Why Do #BlackHoles Look Like This?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2YsF47BMvY&ab_channel=TheScienceAsylum

#ScienceAsylum #NickLucid #Science #Astrophysics #Physics #GR #GeneralRelativity #Gravity #Spacetime #WarpedSpacetime #WarpedSpace #AccretionDisk #Lens #GravitationalLens #GravitationalLensing #Optics #Doppler #Shadow

Here are 3 ways a #Multiverse could exist

"Is the multiverse possible? Yes! In fact, there are 3 different kinds: #ManyWorlds, #EternalInflation, and #Infinite Repeating #Space" - #TheScienceAsylum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cfN-QxJkjU&ab_channel=TheScienceAsylum

#ScienceAsylum #NickLucid #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfCosmology #Cosmology #Astrophysics #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumPhysics #WaveFunction #Inflation #Universe #Omniverse #Infinity

How does #Hawking #Radiation REALLY work?

"Nothing can escape #BlackHoles, yet somehow they can lose #Mass by emitting #HawkingRadiation?!" - #TheScienceAsylum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrUvLlrvgxQ&ab_channel=TheScienceAsylum

#ScienceAsylum #NickLucid #Physics #Astrophysics #Conservation #Information #ConservationOfInformation #Energy #ConservationOfEnergy #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumPhysics #QFT #QuantumFieldTheory #FieldTheory #QuantumField #QuantumFields #Spacetime #VirtualParticles #Evaporation

The Bell Spaceship Paradox

"This #Paradox Took 17 Years To Solve. It's Still Debated." - #TheScienceAsylum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO4a2zO8zW8&ab_channel=TheScienceAsylum

#ScienceAsylum #NickLucid #PhilosophyOfScience #Relativity #GeneralRelivity #SpecialRelativity #Observer #TheObserver #BellSpaceshipParadox #ReferenceFrame #InertialReferenceFrame #Acceleration