I like watching science videos on YouTube and I have a very basic understanding of electronics. But I never seem to get the “negative voltage” thing.
Why is it used and how does it differ from normal voltage.
In: 5
Electromagnetism can attract OR repel, if you have elementary particles that have a negative charge (electrons for example) they will repel other electrons, but attract particles of positive charge (protons in the nucleus). Bottom line, there are elementary particles that have this “charge” property that can be positive OR negative, so all of our electronics have to “deal” with positive and negative voltages, because the elementary particles that we use have these fundamental properties.
As a contrast, elementary particles either have mass or don’t; a “negative mass” particle has NOT been observed. So gravity only attracts, it never repels, and if you could somehow make a “gravity” circuit you would only deal with “positives”.
As another contrast, protons and neutrons are made of 3 quark particles inside them. These quark particles have a property called “[color charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_charge)”, which can be red, green, blue (and anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue). So it’s a three-way system, you don’t just have attraction or repulsion like with electromagnetism, you have a more complicated force interaction (the nuclear force).
Anyway, in terms of electronics, the voltage is the “pull”, the thing that makes the electrons want to move in a direction. Kinda like the pull of gravity, but for electromagnetism it can be a pull (positive voltage attracts electrons) or a push (negative voltage pushes away electrons).
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