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Robert Cohen wrote:
I have something spinning in my room. Is
it possible to describe, via words, which way it is spinning?
An excellent, well-focussed question.
Feynman discusses this at length in _The Character of Physical Law_
near the end of chapter 4.
You can tell who's read this and who hasn't, by saying
"beware left-handed Martians" and seeing who smiles and
who doesn't.
Anyway: Two answers:
1) The answer is _no_, provided you:
-- use just words, i.e. no diagrams, just words you
could speak over an ordinary telephone, and
-- use just pre-1940 physics (no weak nuclear processes), and
-- no outside references (such as the handedness of the Big
Dipper, or the rotation of the earth on its axis).
2) The answer is _yes_ if you disregard any of the provisos
listed above.
-- You can make a big chalk-mark on the floor, an arc with
an arrowhead on one end, and say "it's going this-a-way".
-- You can tell me to borrow Madame Wu's cobalt-60 decay
apparatus and observe the handedness of the beta-decay.
-- You can tell me it's rotating the same direction as the
earth.