REAL MEANING OF ELECTRIC CHARGES

ELECTRIC CHARGES-REALITY OR JUST A CONVENTION

Hey there and today in this post we are gonna talk about electric charges and their significance and real meaning which is certainly not taught in your schools.

What is the real meaning of a charge and why does an electron is given negative charge and a proton a positive charge or can we interchange the charges between them and do the physics remains same if we do that or charges are just arbitrary conventions assumed to satisfy some physical observations. So let's get quickly jump into it.

It all started with the discovery of fundamental particles like electrons,protons and neutrons. We know that there is interaction between two electrons which cannot be described on the basis of gravitational force as it was observed that the electrons repel each other and the gravitational force is only attractive in nature and further the interaction between a proton and electron also cannot be described on the basis of gravitational force as both the particles had very less masses to be strongly attracted towards each other but in contrary they were strongly attracted towards each other and was only affected by the distance between them. And so in order to satisfy this natural phenomenas the particles were assigned a specific convention which was called 'charge' which can be either positive or negative and was said that like nature of charges repel each other and unlike nature of charges attract each other as in the case of an electron and a proton.

So charge(positive or negative) is nothing but an arbitrary convention to describe the nature of interaction(repulsion or attraction) between the subatomic particles which cannot be described on the basis of gravitational force of attraction and this led to the discovery of new type of fundamental force of nature "Electrostatic force" and the magnitude of interaction was given by the expression 'k(q1q2)/r^2'. And 1.6×10^-19coulomb(+1e or -1e) is the magnitude of the so called charge and this magnitude on particles is responsible for interaction between them whether it is getting repelled or attracted which further depends on the nature of charge whether positive or negative and this is the reason why neutron does not interect with the electron and the proton as it does not have any charge or we can say it doesn't possess the magnitude of 1.6 × 10^-19coulomb to interact with the other particles.

And therefore the physics do not change if you interchange the nature of charges between the particles and assign an electron a positive charge and a proton a negative charge  because the magnitude remains same .Later on to describe the cause of repulsion and attraction between the same nature of charges and different nature of charges the concept of electric field lines was introduced and according to it a charged particle produces electric field lines coming out radially from it from all directions and this lines interact with particles having same charges in a different manner and with unlike charges in another manner. The lines would apply lateral pressure(repel)if they are coming from same charged particle like proton and proton or electron and electron and would terminate into another(attract) if they are coming from different charged particle and this characteristic was responsible for attraction and repulsion between two charged particles. However this is also an imaginary concept.

So I hope you find it interesting and amazing and if please share it with your friends.

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About The Comprendia

The Comprendia was founded in 2019 owned and managed by Neelabh Jaiswal is an Indian technology news and science website which covers the intersection of science, astronomy, technology and engineering. It's mission is to provide in-depth relevant information and knowledge.

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