I don't know, but if it is anything like meat spin, I'm staying away from it

I rofled at both replys.

You fucking fag. I mean bro, sorry. I just randomly looked at your name and avatar lol.

BROs unite!

Simple answer: it's a quantity associated to subatomic particles that behaves roughly like classical angular momentum, but has no macroscopic analogue. This definition served me well through a college degree in electrical engineering so I'm guessing it should suffice for you... I may be wrong though.

GAH! Brain can't handle complex things... Jarhead brain shutting down... Can't restart.......

I don't get it why people can't understand such things, it's like understanding mathematics like 1+1. Easy.

I don't know what it "means" philosophically. In some sense, it's not really surprising or deep that there can be particles with non-integer spin. After all, we're imposing our preconceptions of angular momentum on these objects by analogy, for lack of a better way to explain their behavior. Mathematically, -2/3 spin doesn't mean anything special at all; you just carry out the computation and whatever comes out is the answer.

To me, this is like the particle-wave duality of light. It's both, or neither, and anything beyond that is a matter for the philosophers.

I never thought I could learn anything on Star Sonata, especially SS forums.

so "the better way to explain their behaviour" has nothing to do with philosophical insights? im sure einstein would disagree, because in the last 100 years or so, noone has understood einstein's theory better than einstein

now is that because all humans are stupid? possibly. but its far more likely that we're just looking at things the wrong way, taking a pure mathematics approach, when what we should be doing, is observing our enviroment, and using the maths to check our theories

because mathematics is a language, attempting to explain physical principles to people using numbers is like trying to show someone an image by telling them the sequence of binary digits comprising its saved file

perhaps the greatest contribution philosophers give us, is not the ideas themselves, but words with which we can sculpt and communicate those ideas, solid ground upon which the foundations can be laid for concepts which lead to other things

after all, technology comes not from "patches" to the universe's "code", nothing changed in the laws of physics to allow man to invent fire, and ships, and cars, the LANGUAGE changed to allow people to better understand how (and communicate to others how) these objects may operate, and the understanding of those concepts is what allowed the creation of those devices

tl;dr - your aversion to philosophy is your greatest scientific/academic shortcoming.

mathematics and philosophy are nothing without each other.

I had to glance at the wikipedia article to refresh my memory, but it's coming back now. The energy of a photon is directly proportional to its frequency, with constant of proportionality h. That means the energy is inversely proportional to its wavelength. It turns out that every particle can be assigned a wavelength (the de Broglie wavelength), which extends wave-particle duality beyond photons on all particles. So that's where the constant comes from, anyway. If you are really asking why it's also the "elementary quantum of action," that's a tougher question that I'm not qualified to answer. The way I see it, the only way we can make sense of observed subatomic behavior is by the quantization of energy; given that energy is quantized, it's perhaps not surprising that the size of the gap is related to the constant of proportionality between energy and wavelength.

Refuse to be lectured on mathematics and philosophy by landswimmer. /ignore commence.