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
Here’s the secret you don’t learn in high school: **charge isn’t real** (true of a few other things like force as well). It’s a useful way to be able to do math, and therefore to predict stuff, where electrons and protons are concerned.
Nature, though, doesn’t care. Nature doesn’t have to do math – nature just *does*, and we try to watch and describe it. We noticed that some things move in unexpected ways (see: glass/silk), and people proposed a bunch of explanations as to why (“[electric fluid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_theory_of_electricity)”, etc); then, we narrowed it down through experiments to the idea of “charge” we have today. In other words, charge is a mathematical construct that lets us predict what nature is going to do next.
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