I’m preparing for my Chem 2 final and this concept just confuses me.
If an electron is negatively charged, then how can it be positively charged? Wouldn’t that just make it a proton instead of an anti-electron? Does this mean that sub-atomic particles contain both negative and positive charges?
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Elementary particles have multiple properties that you can think of as “independent” of each other. Mass, spin, charge, color-charge, etc. So the designation of “anti-” is used specifically for when the electric charge is the opposite, and the other properties of the particle are the same.
So an electron and anti-electron are exactly the same (mass, spin, etc.) but of opposite charge. A proton and electron, on the other hand, they differ not just in charge (opposite), but also mass (proton is much much heavier).
In fact, if you look at what we currently consider THE elementary particles, electron is one, proton is NOT. Proton is composed of 3 quarks, so you can’t really draw a parallel between electron and proton as particles.
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