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The spinning electron

The spinning electron

Nature Physics volume 4, pages S6–S7 (2008)Cite this article

Wolfgang Pauli, however, was undeterred. He dropped the notion of an interaction between core and radiant electron and proposed instead that line splitting arose as a consequence of an intrinsic property of the electron: “eine klassisch nicht beschreibbare Art von Zweideutigkeit” — a classically indescribable two-valuedness — as he wrote in the first of his two 1925 Zeitschrift für Physik papers.

Ralph Kronig, a young physicist in Landé's laboratory, suggested to Pauli that this might be imagined as the rotation of an electron about its own axis with one half-unit of angular momentum — in other words, spin. Pauli disliked the idea: it was still 'classically indescribable' and, moreover, the calculations of level splitting by Kronig were a factor of two out from measured values. Kronig did not publish, but later that year George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit did — the same idea, beset by the same problems. Pauli still didn't like it.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Stoner, E. C. The distribution of electrons among atomic levels. Phil. Mag. 48, 719–736 (1924)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Pauli, W. Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics, Nobel Lecture, 13 December, 1946. Nobelprize.org[online], (1946)

  2. Tomonaga, S. The Story of Spin (Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997)

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    Alison Wright

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  1. Alison Wright
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Wright, A. The spinning electron. Nature Phys 4 (Suppl 1), S6–S7 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys858

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