When we talk about charge of an electron, why do we not use the negative sign?
In: Chemistry
Because electrons carry an elementary charge.
We simply define it as negative because we have 2 different types of charges, and we know equal charges repel each other, but ultimately there is nothing “positive” about a proton. It’s just convention to make math make sense.
When electricity was first discovered, it was believed that electrons flowed from positive to negative, however electrons actually move from negative to positive. It’s just a way for humans to make sense of it
I’m an absolute beginner so I need to know. Some books used negative sign when giving the magnitude of the charge, some book didn’t. Why is that? Is it appropriate or fine to do that?
The math works the same whether you define the electron as negative or the proton as negative, it only really matters that they’re opposite.
By convention we typically define the electron charge as negative, but you will often find the magnitude of the charge given as an absolute value, which is always positive.
There’s both magnitude and “direction” here, I can say you’re going 65mph or I can be more specific and say you’re going 65mph due East.
The electron’s magnitude is the elementary charge, and the “direction” is negative.
As others have said, it could be either way. For a long time it was thought that static electricity and moving electricity were different things, as one is magnetic.
In 1750, Ben Franklin proposed a “single fluid” model of electricity, where sometimes charge was positive and sometimes it was negative. It turns out this is right, and Franklin chose “vitreous electricity” as positive, and it turns out that this is caused by having fewer electrons (though that wouldn’t be known for many decades).
We do, an electron has a charge of -*e* and a proton has a charge of *e.* Where *e* is the elementary charge or less common called the electron charge. Yes the name is a bit confusing (there’s a historical reason for this) but welcome to physics.
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