In this talk, Denis Seletskiy will try to convince you that the answer to that question is yes.

Maxwell postulated that there can be a current of electric charges in the vacuum. This was needed to turn the equations of electrostatics into a consistent set of quations forming the basis of electrodynamics. We argue that Maxwell’s current are moving virtual elementary particles and their anti-particles in the vacuum. We are using a phenomenological model treating the vacuum as a dielectric. We find this reproduces fairly well the coefficients ε_0 and μ_0. We also formulated the story in the language of quantum field theory.