what the hell is electric charge? Like it doesn’t make sense sense to me how protons are positive and electrons are negative like what does that mean?
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Well at first we did not know. People just discovered that you can charge a thing, and it will repell another charged thing.
Now we know about just as much, except we do understand that there are really small charged particles, and those particles can stick together or travel. And when they travel they create magnetic field.
For the moment we don’t have much more knowledge than “it is what it is”. Electric charge is a property of matter, it can be found in both quarks (the things that make a proton) and leptons (such as electrons).
The defining characteristic of electric charge is how it interacts with other electric charge. Opposites attracting, likes repelling.
Electromagnetism is a fundamental force, meaning it cannot be explained by simpler phenomena, at least not in terms which our physics can articulate.
We can observe it, we can use it to explain more complex phenomena, and we can even manipulate it to serve our own ends, but electromagnetism itself must simply be accepted axiomatically because nothing we can observe “causes” electromagnetic force. It simply exists as part of the reality we know.
Other fundamental forces include the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and gravity. Though according to special relativity, gravity is actually an acceleration made apparent by relative differences in spacetime curvature between observers. Gravity only presents as a force when something acts against this apparent acceleration.
It doesn’t mean anything, it simply is. You may as well ask “what is an electron” or “what is a photon”. They are and we put words and have theories to describe their behavior. These aren’t explanations, they’re simply descriptions of behavior. We could call charge “boo boo” and instead of positive and negative call it “la la” and “lo lo”.
The universe behaves this way and humans give it names and figure out their behavior through mathematics and models of physics. That is the only “sense” that we make out of it. We cannot (yet) answer the question “why are they the way they are” as it seems intrinsic to how the universe works.
Physicists are trying – and things like “string theory” put forward ideas that can “explain” these properties but none of these theories have evidence or even methods to test them. So this is where human understanding lies at this point.
In general physical reality likes balances so “things” as a vague and all-encompassing concept tend to move from locations with a lot of that thing into an area with not lot of that thing. Wind happens because air moves from high pressure to low pressure in an attempt to equalize. Heat energy moves from locations that are hot, have a lot of heat, to locations that are cold, or don’t have much heat.
Charge is one of those things that exists and moves from locations where there is a lot of it to locations where there isn’t. Movement of free electrons just so happen to be the way that charge exists. “Electricity” is the name for what happens when something forcefully creates a difference in charge between two locations and electrons move from the high concentration to low, just like “Wind” is the name for what happens when something forcefully create a difference in air density between two locations and air moves from high to low density.
If you wanna “Why?” at it beyond this point you start getting into the quantum mechanics stuff with the quarks, leptons, bosons, etc that tries to explain why the various subatomic particles are different.
Science is the process of discovering and when discovering new things, you got to categorize and measure and come up with a way to explain it.
So, we observe protons and electrons. And we see hmm, protons act the opposite as electrons do when in a magnetic field. Hmm.. there must be some property about the electron and proton that makes them do the opposite, what should be call this property? Lets call it, ‘Electric Charge’, ok. Now what? Well, since protons and electrons act opposing, let say charge is up and down since they are opposites as well. No, that doesn’t sound good, what about positive and negative? That sounds better, lets do that. We’ll call the proton positive and the electron negative because, why not, but we need to make sure everyone else everywhere says the same thing so lets write a science paper explaining this to the world and get everyone to agree, proton is positive and electron is negative so we can all talk the same.
That’s how all this works.
those are simply names. we found a force that works between certain types of particles and had to give it a name. what is positive and what is negative are arbitrary naming choices for the two opposing elements this force works on.
+/- work pretty well considering when you bring them together they cancel each other out, so naming them “red and blue” for example wouldn’t be as useful.
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