Hannah Fry

And if it is just a metaphor, what is it a metaphor for?

Thank you.

That's one of my favorite messages ever.

Okay.

I have done, I'll be honest with you.

Before this morning, I was quite rusty on quantum spin.

It's been a while.

I'll be honest.

Because people use this phrase, it gets thrown around and in your head I think it conjures up a mental image of a ball that's literally spinning.

It is absolutely not like that at all.

I sort of think in a way it shouldn't be called spin because the analogy

only works really on one level.

We're not talking about physical spin here.

It's more like a property of the particle that's like mass or electric charge, right?

Just in the same ways you can't

take away the mass of an electron, you can't take away its spin either.

It's like a characteristic of it.

But the reason why they've used the word spin is because it's all around how the particle behaves and it's got these similarities to angular momentum.

It's a quantity that gets conserved, essentially.

There's no spinning ball there.