I hear it many trillions pf electrons but what about protons? What makes a charge positive or negative, is it the way they occupy space time?
How many electrons or protons are in a charge. If I = Q/t what does that mean?
In: Engineering
Not an expert, but this might be one of the “which came first? chicken or the egg” questions. A charge is basically a property of a fundamental particle (this isn’t a great explanation) The charge value determines how strongly the particle interacts with the electromagnetic field. What is the electromagnetic field? It is a field which interacts with charged particles.
While there isn’t any particle (that we know of) that makes an electron, a proton is made out of quarks. (2 up 1 down) Each quark has it’s own charge number and the sum of the charges of the quarks in a proton is assigned (arbitrarily) a positive sign and a value of 1. The electron (which is an elementary particle – ie not made out of other particles) is assigned a negative value of 1.
All the measurable stuff is just calibrated off these numbers. A +1 or -1 charge will interact with this amount of energy etc. All the units we choose are fairly arbitrary (there is no “rule” in the universe that defines one Ampere or one Coulomb – these are human defined for measurement purposes.) So we end up with “so many +1 charges or -1 charges makes up a Coulomb” (6.24… x 10^18) and if 1 Coulomb’s amount of charge “flows” past a point in 1 second we call that 1 Ampere.
TLDR: As far as we know, charge is a fundamental property of matter. In modern physics, everything is defined from certain fundamental properties of these elementary particles – charge, spin and mass.
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