In this excerpt from his new book Love and Math, University of California, Berkeley professor Edward Frenkel uses the Russian soup borscht as a metaphor to explain the duality between electric and magnetic forces.

We are all familiar with the electric and magnetic forces. Electric force is what makes electrically charged objects attract or repel each other depending on whether their charges are of the same or opposite signs. For example, an electron has negative electric charge, and a proton has a positive charge (of opposite value). The attractive force between them is what makes the electron spin around the nucleus of the atom. Electric forces create what is called an electric field. We have all seen it in action during a lightning strike, which is caused by the movement of warm wet air through an electric field.

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