We describe electricity as a flow, but that’s not what happens in a typical wire. Physicists have begun to induce electrons to act like fluids, an effort that could illuminate new ways of thinking about quantum systems.

In reality, water and electricity flow in completely different ways. Whereas water molecules move together to form a swirly, coherent substance, electrons tend to fly past one another. “Water is seeing nothing but other water,” said Cory Dean(opens a new tab), a physicist at Columbia University, “but in an electronic system, in a wire, that’s manifestly not the case.” Water molecules unite to flow, but each electron acts on its own.

This every-particle-for-itself movement serves as the foundation for all of electronic theory. It explains why a warm wire resists more than a cold wire, and why a round wire conducts as well as a square wire.

But since the 1960s, theorists have suspected that electrons can be coaxed to act more like their watery counterparts, and to form an electron fluid.

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In recent years, a string of experiments has confirmed that prediction. Last fall, in the most dramatic demonstration yet, Dean and his collaborators arranged for electrons to form a type of shock wave that occurs when a quickly flowing fluid crashes into a slowly flowing fluid. It was a surefire sign that electrons were flowing at extremely high speeds. “That’s really the frontier right now,” said Thomas Scaffidi(opens a new tab), a physicist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the experiment.