(Of course they do) It’s no surprise that PAD has a lot of math and calculations behind the scenes, but a physics professor realized there’s more relationship than that.

The article

Hosho Katsura, an associate professor in University of Tokyo in the School of Science, researches about condensed matter and statistical physics (basically studying how very small things, like electrons work). He stumbled upon PAD, and realized how similar PAD is to his research work and subsequently wrote an article  (Japanese only).

Essentially what he realizes is that you can “spin” PAD orbs to bring the initial orb to the original location, but with the other two orbs switched locations. It turns out that the movement is similar to movement of electrons in solids!

In more basic words, electrons move like PAD orbs.

The best part? “I wish I came up with the game in 2013”, says the professor regretfully. The research was actually done in 2010 but didn’t publish until 2013.

YamaP tried reading it but can’t follow it too…

[Optional] The science

Prof. Katsura’s research is on utilizing two theories to describe solids: Hubbard model and Nagaoka’s theorem, which I will try to outline below:

Hubbard model is basically describing how particles (like electrons) move in a solid (lattice), like how an electron move from one atom to another. Typically this is used to model things at low temperature for simplicity.

Nagaoka theorem is a specific theorem describing the electrons in ferromagnetic state (conductive things). There are some specific conditions for this model to work:

• Number of electrons with one less than the number of lattice points (so you have a hole, an empty slot without electron so that the electrons have room to move)
• Infinite interaction between electrons (so free movement, like in PAD)

With these conditions, the ferromagnetic state, where electron spins aligned, like ↑↑, is found to be the ground state (most stable).

Combining the two

Now putting the two together, you have electrons freely moving in a lattice system, like a grid. They move in a similar fashion as orb movement in PAD, where the electrons exchange places with each other. And with reasons I don’t fully understand (sorry), it’s similar to how the electrons align themselves to their stable ground state.

In short, electrons move like PAD orbs. Well that’s shocking.