The Electron Is Soup: Visualizing Quantum Physics Through Kitchen Analogies

How reimagining electrons as liquid helped me make sense of quantum mysteries

The bubbling of the electron soup. Generated by the author.

In this article, I will discuss a topic completely outside my area of expertise. Nevertheless, it’s a topic that has always fascinated me and I’ve never fully grasped. And just as with other concepts where I’ve found analogies that have helped me model and predict behaviors, here I present my own for understanding what an electron is. And when you stop to think about it, the electron is quite mysterious, isn’t it? Questions often arise such as, why doesn’t the electron ever fall into the nucleus? Or why can it only make certain jumps? Well, this is what I want to understand.

The mysteries

The electron belongs to the quantum world, and because of this, many mysteries arise that are difficult to understand.

The wave-particle duality is one of those most complex mysteries, one that was most surprising, and surely provoked much disbelief at the beginning of the 20th century. Depending on the occasion, the electron behaves like a wave, and depending on the occasion, it behaves like a particle. And in fact, nowadays, we talk about probability clouds and wave function collapse. But in my case, this doesn’t help…