ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Interacting particle system

An interacting particle system is like a big group of little things that are all hanging out together and affecting each other in different ways. Imagine you're playing with a bunch of marbles on a table. If you push one marble, it might roll into another and knock it over, and then that marble might knock into another one and so on. So each marble is doing something, but it's also being affected by what the other marbles are doing.

The same kind of thing happens with interacting particle systems. In science, we might be studying a bunch of tiny molecules or atoms that are all moving and bumping into each other. We can predict how they'll move and interact based on various rules that we've discovered through experiments or mathematical models.

Some of these systems are pretty simple, like the marbles example. But others can get really complex, with lots of different forces and particles interacting in all sorts of ways. Scientists use these models to study all sorts of natural phenomena, from how viruses spread to how weather patterns develop.

In short, interacting particle systems are like big groups of tiny things that all move and interact with each other, and we study them to understand how nature works.