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@monorail a thing I've found after studying physics is it's often really hard, maybe impossible, to say which thing is "why" — if you start from Newtonian mechanics then yeah, conservation of angular momentum is just a neat by-product you can use as a shortcut in these situations, but if you start from quantum mechanics, then angular momentum is fundamental and Newtonian mechanics is a convenient shortcut that falls out of the maths. To properly understand what's happening, sometimes the important thing is that you find the answer that clicks best for you, whether or not it's the "standard" one — I never intuitively understood the angular momentum explanation of precession (why a spinning top stays up) but the linear explanation works fine for me.

(I don't think this invalidates the point at all, just thought it was interesting 🙂)