Weird protons?

Question

How come the protons located in the nucleus doesn't spin like the electron?

Answer 1

The nucleus is held together by the strong nuclear force.

Here are more details:
Protons and neutrons (both are in the nucleus) are made up of quarks, which are tiny particles. At a small distance of only about 10^-12 m, there exists a strong nuclear force between the quarks, which (at the short distance) is greater than the electromagnetic force that causes the protons to repel each other. The electrons, however, don't have a strong nuclear force because they are not made of quarks.

To see why the nucleus is held together so well, take helium-4, for example, with 2 protons, 2 neutrons, and 2 electrons. The 2 protons will obviously repel each other because they are positive, but even so, they attract each other because of the strong force. To add to that strong force, the protons are attracted to the neutrons and the neutrons to themselves, so the strong force far outdistances the electromagnetic force in magnitude.

The electrons orbit the nucleus because they are traveling at an extremely fast velocity (almost the speed of light), but they are being pulled by the electromagnetic force towards the nucleus, creating an end result of orbiting around the nucleus. Note that this is different from a solar system in several ways: 1) Planets are attracted to the sun by gravity, but electrons are attracted to the nucleus by the electromagnetic force; 2) The orbits of the planets around the sun are fairly regular, but the orbits of electrons are random and can be found in electron clouds, or places in an atom that electrons are likely to be.

Answer 2

That's like asking, "How come the sun located in the center of our solar system doesn't spin like the planets?" A clue is that the sun is vastly heavier than any and all of the planets. It's the same thing with the atomic nucleus. Even a single proton is something like 1836 times heavier than an electron, so the nucleus doesn't move much.

Addendum: For those that believe that the question has to do with particle spin, both electrons and protons have spin. Check link below about proton spin. Disambiguation needed here.

Answer 3

First, the electron doesn't spin on itself. That idea came from the fact that electrons have a magnetic field. One way of creating such a field is to move an electric field source around. Considering the size and electrical charge of an electron, its equatorial speed would be faster than the speed of light!

What that means is that you have to take spin as an intrinsic property of matter (it actually comes from small particles such as quarks).

Protons have a one half spin, just like electrons...

To the previous poster: The sun does spin on itself.