Hannah Fry

Bring it over.

I can feel the judgment, the war judgment of all of those guys.

So I'm going to be really careful.

And if I make mistakes, you can tell me in the comments.

Okay.

So, all right.

If you put an electron into a magnetic field, then that electron can align itself with...

that field it can either spin up or it can spin down essentially that direction is a physical genuine direction okay but it only has two states it doesn't it it doesn't like float around it doesn't rotate like a bar magnet does or like a compass would it's sort of it's two states only right it kind of switches between it can flip between them jump between them

And so this is one way that you can actually make an electron spin, because if you are careful and you slowly rotate slowly your magnetic field so that you have your electrons aligning with it, you can effectively rotate an electron.

Right.

But that's that's the only way that you can do it.

But this is one of the ways that quantum computers work, basically, is by altering the magnetic field in order to impose certain characteristics on the quantum particles.

But the numbers that are associated with spin, they sort of do make sense when it comes to rotation.

The thing is that spin really does indicate how weird quantum particles are, because if you have a spin one particle, then if you rotate it 360 degrees, it returns to the same state.

You, Michael, are a spin one particle.

Just a slightly larger version than one might expect in the quantum realm.

A spin half particle, like an electron, see if you can spot this, a little bit weirder.

If you rotate it 360 degrees, it doesn't go back to the same point.

You have to rotate it twice, you have to rotate it 720 degrees for it to return to where it started.

Which is, I mean, yes,