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How do we know the hypothetical graviton must have spin 2? What does that even mean? I can comprehend spin 1/2 fermions and spin 1 bosons, but I don't know what spin 2 would even apply. How was that value for the graviton calculated?

For that matter, how was spin 0 for the Higgs boson calculated?

Qmechanic
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C Worthington
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    Do you understand that fields can be scalars, spinors, vectors, or tensors? These correspond to different spin values. – Ghoster Mar 24 '24 at 00:27
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/12s3bqg/why_does_the_graviton_have_to_be_spin_2_and Plenty of answers there. – Vincent Thacker Mar 24 '24 at 00:30
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    From this viewpoint, your questions are why the graviton is described by a tensor field and why the Higgs boson is a scalar. – Ghoster Mar 24 '24 at 00:36
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    I don't know what spin 2 would even apply Do you mean imply? It would imply that a graviton has twice as much angular momentum along its direction of motion as a photon does. – Ghoster Mar 24 '24 at 00:43
  • Possible duplicates: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/108230/2451 , https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/39476/2451 , https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/65646/2451 , https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/14484/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Mar 24 '24 at 03:30
  • I'll be adding remarks but I wanted to first thank ghoster and tell him that in his few sentences he managed to enlighten me more on the subject than my high school physics teacher ever even tried to. And, yes, I did mean imply. I guess proof-reading is another thing I'm not very good at. – C Worthington Mar 25 '24 at 01:59

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