Sir Michael Atiyah, What is a Spinor ?
Why Physics Stack Exchange recommends it
Physics Stack Exchange users link it when asking or answering what spinors really are, since it offers a geometric view from a leading mathematician beyond the usual representation theory.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2014 to 2022.
What it is
A 38-minute lecture by Sir Michael Atiyah at IHES in which he discusses what a spinor is, opening with a humorous admission that he has worked on them for much of his life without being sure. He frames spinors as a kind of square root of geometry and stresses their geometric meaning.
What people said
Cites bolbteppa · 2014-10 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “How Should I Think About the Dirac Equation?”
Is that all it is? In Atiyah's talk "What is a Spinor" on youtube [this video] I got the impression it was far more than that, what you're saying is more related to spin-statistics ala Finkelstein [LINK] (mentioned around minute 50 in this Susskind video in terms of belts :p [LINK] ) which is another question I may put up.
Cites PhilosophicalPhysics · 2015-03 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “What is a spinor?”
In a youtube video [this video] , sir Michael Atiyah mentioned that even after working during the most of his life on spinors, he doesn't know what a spinor is. Now surely that was part of his humorous introduction to the talk there, but still, we work on spinors but how much are we capable of setting its definition in simple terms? My question is in the simplest form that I can think of: What is a spinor [LINK] ?
Cites iSeeker · 2022-05 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “What is the idea behind 2-spinor calculus?”
May I suggest a somewhat intuitive way to try to answer the question, inspired by the late Sir Michael Atiyah's view that " spinors are the square root of geometry ". Atiyah argues in his lecture " What is a spinor ? [this video] " that just as the really deep part of complex numbers lies in their role in complex analysis and Cauchy's theorem etc. (rather than just as solutions to polynomials), so the deeper aspect of spinors in his view relates not so much to representation theory and its associated algebra, but rather in their geometric meaning.* For what it's worth, I therefore take the idea (the philosophy even?) behind 2-spinors, and their calculus, to be that spinors allow the notion of ext