ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Proton spin crisis

Okay kiddo, so you know that protons are tiny particles that make up atoms, right? Well, scientists have been studying these protons for a long time and they thought they knew everything about them. But one day, they realized there was a problem with the way they understood proton spin.

A proton's spin is how it rotates around its own little axis. Scientists thought that the spin of a proton was made up of the spins of its three building blocks called quarks. But when they did some experiments, they found something really weird. They found that the spins of the quarks added up to only a small part of the proton's spin.

This was a big problem. Scientists called it the proton spin crisis because they didn't know what was going on. They thought maybe there were more building blocks inside the proton that they didn't know about. But they couldn't find any evidence of that.

Now, scientists are still studying this problem and trying to figure out what's going on with the proton's spin. It's not an easy problem to solve, but they're working hard to understand it better. So, don't worry, scientists will keep working on it until they solve the proton spin crisis!