UC Riverside Researchers' Discovery Of Electrostatic Spin Topples Century-old Theory

Science Daily ^ | 4-3-2003 | Editorial Staff

[vannrox]

Cool. And shocking!

[El Sordo]

Anyone want to put that in layman's terms for those of us who are not electrically inclined?

[HighRoadToChina]

BUMP!

[EternalVigilance]

Now the Greens are going to want to ban Static-Guard....

[Slyfox]

[homeagain balkansvet]

But What Does It Mean?

I'm still working on that perpetual motion machine, just a few kinks yet....

[Southack]

In my classes, this old "effect" was called the right-hand rule. Hardly new...

[remitrom]

Now we know the physics behind media spin.

[Quix]

As a rather ignorant but moderately read layman,

bells are going off that this is somehow related to zero point energy.

OK, scream tinfoil hat all you wish.

Tnen perhaps someone with a fair minded perspective and some significant reading on the topic will tell me whether my notion is totally far fetched or not.

[Slyfox]

[JusPasenThru]

This is just the point I've been trying to make for years....

[John Locke]

Run a current through some spheres and they start to rotate. Not enough detail in the story to say why - could be the old right-hand rule; could be some interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. One thing for sure - nobody is creating angular momentum out of thin air.

Not particularly new - Toshiro Higuchi at the University of Tokyo has been working on applications of electrostatic rotation for several years now. And I don't see what is so exciting - the idea that macroscopic "rotation" has anything to do with quantum mechanical "spin" seems totally off the wall.

[EternalVigilance]

The dreaded red x....

[aruanan]

The observed electrostatic rotation was not expected and could not be explained by available theory.

PINK MATTER ALERT

[waspguy]

On a quick read:

Basic understanding of the Electric force says that it simply has a radial component - no angular dependence. (It only pushes or pulls along the line separating the two charges.)

This result would seem to indictate that there is a (as yet unknown) component of electricity which causes things to want to rotate around some axis as well.

My gut feeling is to be pretty sceptical. My first objection is a symetry objection - how would the charge be able to decide which axis to rotate around? There would have to be some prefered directionality in space-time for this to be true, and that's not observed in other places.

On the other hand, we have no idea why electron's exhibit magnetic moments and have an associated "spin". If there is some effect like this - then the electron (and proton) spin might necessarily follow.

(Interesting side note - neutrons have spin and yet are electrically neutral. I've seen this attributed to the magnetic moments of the constituent quarks - I wonder if there's a way to test the new model via this mechanism?)

Ah well - I think I'll wait for other verification. If true this is certainly unexpected.

[templar]

There would have to be some prefered directionality in space-time for this to be true, and that's not observed in other places.

What, exactly, would a preferred direction in space-time consist of, and how would it be measured?

[Born to Conserve]

Simply put: "Electrostatic spin is cold fusion without the cold or the fusion."

[aruanan]

In my classes, this old "effect" was called the right-hand rule. Hardly new...

The right-hand rule deals with an electric current. The news above deals with an electrostatic charge.

The right-hand rule for force on a conductor can be used to determine the direction of the force experienced on the conductor. If the right thumb points in the direction of the current in the conductor and the fingers of the right hand point in the direction of the external magnetic field, then the force on the conductor is directed outward from the palm of the right hand.

[waspguy]

Re: a preferred direction in spacetime...

That's the problem. According to Relativity, there can be no preferred frame of reference. My "up" is no more valid than your "up". If electrostatic charges were to setup some sort of spin - then that would have to be spin around an axis. But given the spherical symmetry of the situation, how would the charge be able to pick an axis out all the possible choices?

My argument is similar to a question once posed to me by my thesis advisor - "Why is it that the Laplace operator shows up so often in physics?" A: Because it's the simplest rotationaly invariant operator - the simplest way to ensure there's no prefered direction in the Universe.

For this result to be true (and it might be for all I know) we'll have to toss out most of our understanding of classical physics - but then replace it with something that gives exactly the same results in most cases, but now includes this unexpected result. You'd have to toss out most of classical physics (and Quantum mechanics as well since it has the Laplace operator in the Schroedinger equation as well.)

I guess it just seems to me that there's too much beauty in the symmetry arguments of classical physics to do such a thing.

(Of course I'll bet Ptolomey felt the same way about the geo-centric universe. Grin.)

[Southack]

"When a DC voltage was applied to the spheres they began to rotate until the stiffness of the suspending wires prevented further rotation."