What makes an electron have a negative charge and a proton a postive charge?
What i mean is that when you learn about the atom you learn that an electon has a negative charge and a proton has a positive charge, but what does that really mean? What defines a subatomic particle's charge? At an elementary particle level what really is a charge?
Does a neutron have a negative charge?
It's a neu idea. It puts the neu in neutral and neutron. Protons are positive, electrons are negative and neutrons are neutral.
An electron is not made of quarks, so how does the negative charge come on an electron?
An electron is an elementary particle, which is a wave trapped in spacetime. Electrons are known to have no internal structure. No one knows for sure what charge is or how it gets onto a particle, but it appears to be a flow of energy from higher dimensions of the multiverse.This is about the best speculative explanation we have until we develop more advanced instrumentation that can get more data to settle this question. I find it more satisfying than the textbook non-explanation of “it just is a fundamental property”.
If a quark can have charge -1/3, does it mean the electron has 3 units of charge?
The question asked is:“If a quark can have charge -1/3, does it mean the electron has 3 units of charge?”A comment to Logan R. Kearsley’s answer made by what appears to be the OP is:“So this is simply a matter of convention? A unit of -1/3 charge is convention? The Quarks have electrical charge based on convention?”The apparent OP has as a credential “Phd Elementary Particle Physics & Mathematics, University of Cambridge 1975”. Something here just doesn’t add up. I don’t have a PhD, so I can only answer this if I assume that Quora messed up and incorrectly connected this question from someone who doesn’t have a PhD in physics to a user who does have a PhD in physics.If a quark had a charge of -1/3 and an electron had a charge of 3, the ratio would be 9. We don’t observe that. We observe that quarks have 1/3 or 2/3 the charge of an electron and either the same sign or the opposite sign.The units of charge could be integer units of e, which is the conventional unit, or integer units of QQ, which is what I just made up and it is the smallest charge of a quark that is the same sign as the electron. While I am at it, I am changing the sign of the electron, so that building circuits makes more sense. The charge on an electron is +3 QQ.The convention came about because we needed to start calling things by some names before we knew everything. So, before we knew that electrons were smaller than protons and were the thing that made electricity do things, someone had to pick negative or positive. IMHO, they picked wrong, but couldn’t have known that. You can take your time machine back and kill Hitler. I am taking mine back to George Johnstone Stoney’s heyday and changing “-” to “+” in his notes.The convention for quarks being 1/3 and 2/3 stems, of course, from the fact that by the time they were discovered, we had already cemented in place the unit of charge of the electron.
What gives a proton a positive charge, an electron a negative charge, and neutral no charge?
I'm not aware that anyone has fully explained what the "charge" is. It is described as a fundamental property and defined as the tendency to create or respond to electric fields . . . My theory is probably terribly dated, but . . . There are two classes of fundamental particles (particles not made up of other particles). These are quarks and leptons. There are six quarks, six anti-quarks, six leptons, and six anti-leptons. Leptons, while truly fundamental, can exist independently. The most familiar lepton is the electron, which has a charge of -1. A positron, or anti-electron, is identical but has a charge of +1. Quarks do not occur independently. They respond to the strong force and come together to form hadrons. There are (at least) two classes of hadrons. Baryons are composed of three quarks, whereas mesons are composed of a quark and an antiquark. There are six quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. The charge on a quark is either 2/3 or -1/3. I do not know why. A proton is a baryon made of two up quarks and a down quark. It has a +1 charge because the up quark has a charge of 2/3 whereas the down quark has a charge of -1/3. Neutrons, on the other hand, are made up of two down quarks and an up quark. The charge is zero: 2/3 + 2(-1/3) = 0. The underlying simplicity is elusive.
Why electron have -tive charge & proton have + charge?
In 'matter', electrons are defined to have negative and protons are defined to have positive charge. It doesn't actually matter which way around these are. Indeed, originally electrons were thought to have positive charge, which is why electric CURRENT flows from positive to negative, even though the electrons flow in the opposite direction. In antimatter, however, an anti-electron, or positron, is exactly the same as an electron, but with positive charge. An anti-proton is exactly the same as a proton, but with negative charge.
What is a positive charge, negative charge, and static electricity?
Electric charge is a characteristic of subatomic particles, and is quantized. When expressed as a multiple of the so-called elementary charge e, electrons have a charge of −1. Protons have the opposite charge of +1. Quarks have a fractional charge of −1/3 or +2/3. The antiparticle equivalents of these have the opposite charge. There are other charged particles. The electric charge of a macroscopic object is the sum of the electric charges of its constituent particles. Often, the net electric charge is zero, since naturally the number of electrons in every atom is equal to the number of the protons, so their charges cancel out. Situations in which the net charge is non-zero are often referred to as static electricity. Furthermore, even when the net charge is zero, it can be distributed non-uniformly (e.g., due to an external electric field), and then the material is said to be polarized, and the charge related to the polarization is known as bound charge (while the excess charge brought from outside is called free charge). An ordered motion of charged particles in a particular direction (typically these are the electrons) is known as electric current.
Why there is positive charge and negative charge in nature?
Edit: quarks have charges of positive and negative 1/3 and 2/3. When three quarks of charge -1/3 come together they make an electron of charge -1When two quarks of charge +2/3 and one -1/3 come together they make a proton of charge +1.Edit2:Charge may very well not exist at all, it’s something we define to explain the reaction between two particle.There are particles called “quarks” that make particles like proton and electron, they have charge so electrons and protons have charge. But charge is just a characteristic of some particles like mass and other properties. We define particles by their properties like mass and charge. (Let me know if you need a more complicated answer, I can give you some concepts of symmetry breaking and string theory. )It’s like asking why things have mass? They just do! It exists so no one can say why it does.If you believe in God, then he created chargeIf you don’t then you shouldn’t really care why charge exists, it just does.