Consider that human thinking struggles to describe even individual atoms with real precision. How is it, then, that we can possibly have good science about things that are made up of many atoms, like magnets or tornadoes or eukaryotic cells or planets or animals? It seems like a miracle that the natural world can contain patterns and objects that lie within our understanding, because the individual constituents of those objects are usually far too complex for us to parse.

You can call this occurrence the “miracle of emergence”. I don’t know how to explain its origin. To me, it is truly one of the deepest and most wondrous realities of the universe: that simplicity continuously emerges from the teeming of the complex.

When humans learned how to harness the flow of electric current, it completely changed the way we live and our relationship to the natural world. In the modern era, the idea of electricity is so fundamental to our way of living that we are taught about it within the first few years of elementary school. That teaching usually begins with pictures that look something like this:

That is, we are given the image of electrons as little points that flow like a river through some conducting material. This image more or less sticks around, with relatively little modification, all the way through a PhD in physics or electrical engineering.

But there is a dirty secret behind that image: it doesn’t make any sense.