The s2 orbit contains a sphere with an infinitely thin surface, upon which there is a flat zero percent chance of the electron ever being located there - even though the electron has a non-zero chance of being inside the sphere and outside the sphere. That field would become our zero point, the baseline from which we measure everything else. Most people's immediate objection to this model is that we don't see the entire universe filled with a negative electromagnetic field. But if this field of negative charge is smooth on average, then how could we detect it as such? The worry then is that causal models, in particular on an interventionist conception of cause, cannot get a foothold within such a globalist conception of physics. Each electron will get pushed out of the way as the intruder approaches, only to quickly move back again after it passes. But hopefully it has helped you see, however dimly, one way in which the things we call a quantum particle may not actually be anything like particles, and yet still permit the universe to make sense. If and when the electron is kicked out of its orbit and leaves the atom for adventures elsewhere, there's no telling if the billiard ball that actually left was the same one or not.

An americium-241 atom will spontaneously throw off an alpha particle. Some of the electron oribts in the atom have strange discontinuities in their shapes. In this situation, there is no longer a simple trajectory: the electrons swarm around in their orbits, remaining largely within various shapes (depending on the orbit), but following no directional path that we know of. So we know the cars, quote, ‘lit up’ right after the dust went, you know, blocked out the sunlight. I don’t know the answer; I’m highly curious. And in fact there are actually a number of features that fail to conform to observed reality, so (as I warned you) it was purely a whimsical exercise after all. Now, if you try to maintain a naive visual model of electrons, one that assumes that in order to get from point A to point B a particles has to pass through every point inbetween, this is a very unhappy fact to have to contend with. It would be what we would call "the vacuum of space." And so, in this hyperabundant model, the object that we referred to as "an electron" would actually be any position in space that contains one more electron (our billiard-ball kind of electron, that is) than "the vacuum".

It is inextricably mixed with the vacuum of space that surrounds it, for it is made of exactly the same stuff. If we have a volume of space in which the electrons are more or less evenly dispersed, and then a new electron arrives, travelling at a high rate of speed, it's easy to see that it will cause a ripple through this space. If so then it may surprise you to learn that none other than Paul Dirac seriously suggested a model very much like this. Attempting to explain what appeared to him (and everyone) as a rather far-fetched idea, Dirac suggested that an antimatter electron could be explained as an "electron hole" if one presupposed a universe full of electrons. One noteworthy consequence of this model is that antimatter should fall up, not down, in a gravitational field, exactly like a bubble of air rising in a glass of carbonated water.

Here an electron disappearing from one side of the sphere and reappearing on the other is a little like the bump in the carpet that when you push it down causes another to pop up a few inches away. Sadly, this particular test is a very difficult one to do, due to the effort involved to make (and preserve) enough antimatter to make the gravitational effect on it measurable, What are billiard balls made of and at this point in time no one has succeeded. They will never get to settle down anywhere near long enough for the pertubations to smooth out into that perfect universal lattice of minimal energy. And as a result they will tend to settle into a universe-sized lattice, each electron being roughly equidistant from all of its immediate neighbors in an attempt to stay as far away from each other as possible. Similarly, we might ask if hitting one of the balls with a hammer exactly as they collide will result in changes to the balls’ motion after they collide or before they collide. The result is that the electrons are always moving around, sometimes quite speedily, jostling each other in the process.