Every night that I need to fall asleep quickly because I stayed up too late and should have been in bed hours before, I think about spin. One dimensional space is boring. Two dimensions have no depth. Three dimensions are a ball. But the fourth dimension is really intriguing. What is it? In physics, it’s the space/time continuum. What’s this got to do with spinning? I think of it as a fourth dimension being exerted on a three dimensional object. Okay, boring. Well, it is and it’s not. No matter how I try to spin anything in any fantastic or whimsical way, it always has an axis of rotation. Even when I rotate one axis around another, rotate the x-axis at the same time as the y-axis, it resolves itself to one axis. This leads to all sorts of thoughts about space and time; like infinity going on forever or time only flowing in one direction. We can get an atom so cold that we think that we have completely stopped all it’s rotations of every quark. But to measure it, we have to bounce something off or otherwise pull or tweak it. That adds energy and it takes that energy and spins with it. It’s the last motion that we are trying to stop. It makes me wonder if it was the first motion that caused the big bang. Everything was the same, a plasm. Then something started being different and it spun out of control.
