For quite some time, I have been trying to understand elementary particles—especially the electron—as structured objects rather than point-like entities. The intuition was simple: instead of something static, imagine something that moves, something that circulates.
In earlier work, I explored models in which charge moves in a loop—what you might call a ring current. That idea turns out to be surprisingly powerful. It naturally connects to the electron’s magnetic moment, its angular momentum, and even to a characteristic length scale that seems to “fit” remarkably well with what we know from quantum physics.
So at first sight, it feels like you’re onto something.
But then the cracks start to appear.
The first issue is familiar: a charge moving in a circle should radiate. That alone already makes the picture problematic. But even if you try to work around that, deeper questions arise. What is actually holding this motion together? What is acting on what? And—more fundamentally—what does it even mean to speak of a “charge” moving at that scale?
At some point, I realized that the problem might not be the idea of circulation itself, but what is assumed to be circulating.
My latest paper on ResearchGate reflects a shift in that thinking.
Instead of imagining a charge moving along a trajectory, I now look at the possibility that what circulates is not charge, but energy. In that picture, the electron is no longer a particle following a path, but a localized configuration of fields in which energy continuously flows in closed loops.
This change sounds small, but it turns out to be conceptually important. It removes the need to talk about a point-like object moving at extreme speeds, and replaces it with a structure that is, in a sense, stationary—even though internally something is still “going round and round.”
Interestingly, this field-based picture manages to preserve much of the original intuition. You still get circulation. You still get angular momentum. You still get a natural scale that ties energy to motion. In that sense, the original idea wasn’t wrong—it was just expressed in a way that leads to inconsistencies.
However, the new formulation also makes something else very clear.
Electromagnetism alone is not enough.
If you analyze the balance of forces in such a configuration, you find that things almost work. Electric and magnetic effects can nearly compensate each other. There is a kind of near-equilibrium that reflects the original intuition of something “held together” dynamically.
But “almost” is not good enough.
There is no true stability. No mechanism that fixes the size of the structure. No reason why it should not simply expand or dissolve.
That turns out to be the key insight of the paper, which you can find here.
If we want a stable, particle-like object, something else must be present—some additional ingredient that provides a form of tension or confinement. In the paper, I explore a couple of simple toy models that illustrate how such stabilization might arise. They are not meant as final answers, but as minimal examples of what is required.
So where does that leave the original idea?
Not discarded—but refined.
The notion that particles are built from circulating something still seems meaningful. But it is no longer “charge moving in space.” It is better understood as energy organized into a persistent pattern—a structure that maintains itself through the interplay of fields and whatever additional mechanisms are needed to stabilize it.
This paper is part of an ongoing attempt—what I’ve loosely called the “RealQM” approach—to explore how far such intuitive, semi-classical ideas can be pushed, and where they inevitably run into the need for a deeper framework.
It does not offer a finished theory. If anything, it does the opposite: it makes very clear where the simple models break, and why.
But that, too, is a form of progress.
Reading Feynman 