Absolutely! Just wanted to highlight. It is easier to think of stable and localized collective behaviors (protons) as particles than unstable and delocalized (anyons).

Both are collective behaviors but most of the time you can think of protons as “balls made of quarks.” It’s not quite right but with semi classical treatment you get most of the effects. Anyons are not even approximately balls made of electrons. They break a lot of “classical particle” intuition the way protons don’t.

But if you think of them as the waves, any kind of close and stable wave superposition can be called "a particle". At some point, we might just drop the "particle world" and go with the "quantum systems".

Most people have an intuition about particles, they don’t have an intuition for quantum systems.

I wanted to highlight for a general reader that anyons are not particle in the sense of common intuition.

Protons, which the article brings as an example of collective phenomenona, roughly follow a lot of “particle intuition.”

Here is a link to the quasiparticles Wikipedia page that may be helpful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle

Personally, I don’t mind if folks reify these things to make it easier to follow, fwiw.

I wonder whether we could change school curricula so that people develop an intuition about quantum systems instead. I my schooling I learned almost exclusively particle abstractions. It's only natural that I'm more comfortable with particles.

> Most people have an intuition about particles

That intuition is also most likely completely wrong.

In this case, electric current is NOT carried by electrons.

Electrons in a material are effective particles, with a different mass, vide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_ph....

Partice != fundamental particle.