HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of electron spin.

In 1922, the Stern-Gerlach (named after Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach) experiment sent a beam of silver atoms through a deflecting magnetic field and onto a collecting plate. Charged electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom create a “magnetic moment” (a vector of twisting force) that makes the atom behave as though it were a [...]

Based on the previous Schrodinger equation and Klein-Gordon equation, in 1928 Paul Dirac produced a wave equation that helped to explain the characteristic of an electron known as “spin”. In part, it dealt with an expansion of Einstein’s famous equation of “e=mc^2″ that allowed a consideration of two sets of roots, one positive and one [...]

The Faraday effect showed magnetic fields interact with beams of light by rotating the plane of polarization of the light. Lorentz hypothesized that a magnetic field would also effect the frequency of light given off. Then, in 1896 Pieter Zeeman discovered that when you place an atom that is emitting photons into a magnetic field, [...]

Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna, Austria in 1900 and was a physicist known as one of the creators of quantum mechanics. He particularly become known for the “Pauli Exclusion Principle” which states that no two electrons can be in the same quantum state at the same time. PRECURSOR: 1831 – Maxwell 1838 – Mach [...]