Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...

We’re all familiar with the magic of the Olympic games. Once every four years, the entire family sits down together to watch a selection of sports that many of us are not routinely exposed to. As a ...

Scientists have, for the first time, experimentally proven that angular momentum is conserved even when a single photon splits into two, pushing quantum physics to its most fundamental limits. Using ...

Schematic of a single photon with zero angular momentum (green) splitting into two photons (red) with either zero or opposite angular momenta (sketched through the spatially varying color), which adds ...

Many people don't know too much about angular momentum—and that's fine. But what about figure skaters? Whether they understand the concept of angular momentum doesn't matter but they use it in one of ...

It's almost always the last topic in the first semester of introductory physics—angular momentum. Best for last, or something? I've used this concept to describe everything from fidget spinners to ...