Construct · 4 fields · 4 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningPauli exclusion principlecompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to spin is Pauli exclusion principle.
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Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit proposed in 1926, in Spinning Electrons and the Structure of Spectra, that the electron carries an intrinsic angular momentum, later called spin, quantized in half-integer units of the reduced Planck constant. The referent is a single particle, and spin is a fixed property it simply has, not a description of the particle turning on an axis; an electron's spin is one half whether or not anything moves. Pauli soon set the idea on formal footing with the spin matrices that bear his name. Here spin names a quantized quantum number carrying units of angular momentum, and the word borrows the picture of rotation without the rotation.[1]
Esser, Reinemann, and Fan studied in 2001, across the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, what journalists call spin: the deliberate effort by political actors and their advisers to shape how news is framed so that coverage favours them. In Spin Doctors in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany they treat spin as metacommunication, the press reporting on the manipulation itself, and the referent is a communicative practice around a message, not any physical quantity. Here spin is the management of framing and perception, and it turns on intent and audience rather than on angular momentum. It shares only the word with the physicist's spin.[2]
In corporate finance a spin-off is the separation of a business unit into an independent company, with shares in the new firm distributed to the parent's existing shareholders. Hite and Owers examined the practice in 1983 in Security price reactions around corporate spin-off announcements and found that parent shareholders on average gained value around the announcement. The referent is a transaction that changes a firm's boundaries, and spin here is short for spinning off a division, a matter of ownership and organisation rather than motion or messaging. It shares the word with quantum spin and with a ball's spin, and little else.[3]
When a ball is thrown or struck with spin, its rotation interacts with the surrounding air and deflects its path, the Magnus effect. Nathan modelled this in 2008 in The effect of spin on the flight of a baseball, relating the ball's measured rate of rotation to a sideways Magnus force and the resulting curve. The referent is a spinning object in a fluid, and spin here is literal rotation, counted in revolutions or radians per second, which is precisely what quantum spin is not. It is the everyday meaning of the word, and it collides with the others only in spelling.[4]
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