"Electrons and suchlike entities simply are, indeed they have always (or at least for eons) been, and they eventually made themselves known in the laboratory. It is nowadays fashionable to talk of non-human beings as though they act rather like people. The contemporary realist... might... find poetically congenial the evocative image of an electron as a tangible presence in the late nineteenth century laboratory, where, it might be said, they first learned to speak—or where, perhaps, they were no longer silenced."