Skip to main content
Physics

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

4
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ The experimentalist rotates the equipment and thus the coordinate system. For example, she might make a magnetic field point in a diffetent direction. $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 1, 2018 at 1:08
  • $\begingroup$ @G.Smith Thanks for your comment! If rotating the apparatus counts as rotating the particle, then I think this should be submitted as an answer. After all, rotating equipment has meaning in normal language, whereas rotating a point particle does not. Hence this is precisely the kind of operationalization I was hoping for. $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 1, 2018 at 20:41
  • $\begingroup$ I don’t like to think about rotating the particle because I don’t know what rotating a point particle would mean. So I think about rotating the particle’s wave function (which in general is an extended, non-spherically-symmetric thing). This is just rotation of a function of three coordinates, and mathematically “actively” rotating a 3D function within a fixed coordinate system and “passively” rotating the coordinate system are equivalent. $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 18:46
  • $\begingroup$ Fair enough! :) I suppose the people who write about rotating the particles are the ones who should be explaining themselves. $\endgroup$ Commented Dec 3, 2018 at 12:18