Back in English classes, you learned the distinction between a metaphor, "Hope is the thing with wings" and a simile, "The dawn came up like thunder." Now science is full of similes. When you express them as metaphors, you're asking for trouble. (Economics, for example, uses the auction market as a metaphorical simplification for how prices are set. Not only freshman beginners but professionals in the field can act like they believe that prices are set by auction markets. If Adam Smith had said, "Prices are set as if they were in an auction market," there would be much less confusion in Economics.)
Physics courses deal with "rigid bodies" as a simile for how real objects act. It's a quite good simile for a crowbar. The girders in a skyscraper are the shape they are ("I-beam") because that shape is the least flexible shape. Even so, any architectural engineer must take account of the sway in the wind when designing a skyscraper.
As you go down in scale, the simile for a gas molecule in explaining thermodynamics, is a small rubber ball. The simile for an atom in molecules is a smaller ball, and the simile for protons and electrons in an atom is an even smaller ball. It doesn't take great insight to see that these similes are inconsistent; a ball isn't made up of a few smaller balls.
The "Bohr Model" of the atom is a nucleus with electrons circling it just like planets orbiting the sun. The more current simile is closer to an electron being a cloud surrounding the nucleus, but a cloud without any parts.
In any event, what you learn in science comes in three levels:
1 Phenomena -- what can be observed and/or measured.
2 Generalizations -- of phenomena. Usually, but not always, these are formulae these days.
3 Similes -- Rigid bodies, frictionless planes, massless strings.
Light is a particle on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It's a wave on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It's a wavicle on Sundays.
We live on one scale. The smallest infant is not two orders of magnitude smaller than the largest man who ever lived. We experience things on that scale. Physicists sometimes get results on much smaller and much larger scales. Some of those results involve behaviors of objects when such behaviors are not observable on our scale. Scientists and science popularizers think up similes for those behaviors. Even so, the similes still contradict our experience.
Go below the orange swirl for one example.
We know rotating physical objects. For that matter, we live on one. They rotate around one axis. There is a sense, a fairly abstract one, in which they rotate to a lesser degree about axes at an acute angle with the main one. (Read about Foucault's pendulum or visit one.) They have zero rotation about an axis perpendicular to the main one.
Now, electrons have a property that physicists call "spin" in relation to any axis through their centers. It has the value of either +1/2 Planck's constant or -1/2 Planck's constant. If an electron has spin +1/2 WRT the North direction, it has the spin of -1/2 WRT the South direction. Spin WRT any particular direction can be tested, and a stream of electrons can be separated into 2 streams (with approximately equal numbers in each stream) one with spin +1/2 WRT to that direction, and the other with spin -1/2.
If you test the spin of a stream of electrons WRT North, take the resulting stream which tests +1/2, and test it again, every electron in the stream will test +1/2 again. If you take that stream, and test it WRT the West direction, it will split into two streams (of equal numbers), each electron of one of which has a spin of +1/2 and each electron of the other has the spin -1/2.
If you test the stream that results from first being spin +1/2 WRT North, and then spin +1/2 WRT West and then test it WRT North again, then it will split into 2 streams (of roughly equal numbers) one of which will consist of electrons which test to a spin of +1/2 and the other of electrons which test to a spin of -1/2.
Once you have separated the streams, you can reunite them. If you take the stream which tests (WRT North) as spin +1/2, split it with a test WRT West, then reunite that stream, then test it again WRT North, you will find that all the electrons have spin +1/2.
There is nothing which behave remotely like this in the world of our size-scale.
Now, the excuse for calling it "spin" is that:
It has the same units as angular momentum, and
It is closely associated with a direction. (The so-called "right-hand rule" associates each rotation with the direction of one of its poles.) Other subatomic particles than the electron also have spin.
Quantum mechanics has 3 levels:
1 A large number of phenomena.
2 A set of differential equations which can predict these phenomena at least at the statistical level.
3 A variety of mutually contradictory "interpretations" of these phenomena. These are the similes.
If you're a layman, what you read about is one or another interpretation. The interpretation is not necessarily valid because the differential equations are.