I was thinking along the lines of “use paint remover?”

They don’t want to (at least not for now).
Here’s why:

“80% Of French Women Want The Army Deployed In French Cities To Protect Them”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/80-french-women-want-army-deployed-french-cities-protect-them

“Circumference” in quotes because they don’t seem to have a circumference either. Sometimes it’s easier to think of electrons as a set of numbers: it’s got mass, charge, and spin, and a few other numbers, but it doesn’t have like a volume or a surface or a shape.

Goutsmit: I think I still have Heisenberg’s letter. In it he writes a formula ……… I did not understand a bit of it. And then he says somewhere: “What have you done with the factor 2?”

Simple enough to construct a short Greek or Latin term. Like “rota” or something.

Sigh…then as seniors trying to break them away from such to the more abstract, and correct, view of 1/2hbar(1 0), and -1/2hbar(0 1) with the 3 spin matrices.

Spoiler alert: it never would be. “Spin” is a metaphor. Electrons don’t literally spin. They have intrinsic angular momentum, true, but don’t have a way to spin like tops.

This is one complaint I have about physics in the last century, the move to give cute names in English to things that in earlier centuries would have been Latin or Greek. I think this just confuses people.

The English names are just metaphors or maybe mnemonics for abstract properties, like the “color” of quarks. At least with Latin or Greek a new word had been constructed that didn’t confuse people by being a commonly-used word.

No wonder Dirac boasted that his theory described “most of physics and all of chemistry.”

Dirac is another one, like Maxwell, who deserves to be as well known with the public as Einstein or Newton.

A nice summary of the Dirac Equation by Edmund Blair Bolles:

On January 2, 1928, Paul Dirac submitted a paper to the Royal Society which, in the words of a Danish historian of science, “marked the end of the pioneering and heroic era of quantum mechanics.” Dirac’s paper managed what Schrödinger had failed to do two years earlier, link special relativity and quantum waves.

When Schrödinger first tried to include Einstein’s relativistic mechanics in his wave equation, he did not know about electron spin. Although the spinning electron still had never been physically observed, its effects had been measured. A spinning electric charge produces a magnetic field. Electrons carry a charge and generate a magnetic field; hence, electrons must be spinning. Using this extra knowledge, Dirac had created a miraculously exact rule for calculating the electrodynamics of the atom.

The Dirac equation (actually a set of four equations compressed into one complex expression) can be used to compute the magnetism of electrons. The answer it gives is precisely the one that experimentalists find in the lab. This discovery was the quantum theory’s equivalent of Einstein’s success at computing Mercury’s orbit.

Classical notions had failed to predict the observed ratio between the electron’s spin rate and its magnetic strength, so when Dirac’s equation calculated perfectly the experimentally observed values, physicists had no choice but to nod respectfully.

Dirac’s equation could also give the correct values in situations where Schrödinger’s equation did work. The Bose-Einstein statistics, too, were folded into the Dirac equation, along with Planck’s original quantum equation and Einstein’s E = h?. Even Einstein’s most famous baby, E = mc2, was built into the Dirac equation. No wonder Dirac boasted that his theory described “most of physics and all of chemistry.”

One of early mysteries that Dirac struggled with was that in relativistic quantum mechanics the number of particles in a system was not fixed. Hence creation/destruction operators. It is hard to realize at this point how big a change in outlook that was, it is very non-classical.