[Eli5] What is electrical charge? Like, how do we know that electrons have a negative charge and what does that actually mean?
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There is this one thing that attracts some stuff with a strength of 5. There is thing other thing that attracts other stuff with a strength of 5. When we put them together, they stop attracting stuff (i.e. attract things with a strength of 0). Things like the first thing push each other away though. Things like the second thing push each other away too.
With math… this looks like negative and positive numbers… putting together 5 and -5 gives you 0. Putting two negatives or two positives together gives you a bigger negative or a bigger positive (as in, farther from 0). Putting a negative and a positive together gives you a number closer to zero. So, we’ve established that there is a “positive” and “negative” property of these things.
From there, we chose arbitrarily which is which. I’ve actually heard arguments that it would have been better to do it the other way around since in practice a lot of electrical stuff we do involves moving electrons around, so it’d make sense that taking them away led to a smaller number and adding them led to a bigger number. But ultimately, it works fine either way.
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