![]() Like charges repel each other and unlike charges attract each other. Electric charge can be positive or negative (commonly carried by protons and electrons respectively, by convention). Any opinions expressed on this website are entirely mine, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of my employers.Electric charge (symbol q, sometimes Q) is the physical property of matter that causes it to experience a force when placed in an electromagnetic field. All text and images on this website not specifically attributed to another source were created by me and I reserve all rights as to their use. Jeff Cruzan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ![]() The mass of the proton is m p = 1.67 × 10 -27 Kg and the mass of the electron is m e = 9.11 × 10 -31 Kg. ![]() From the table above we get that the charge on the electron is q e = -1.603 × 10 -19 C and the charge of the proton is q p = +1.603 × 10 -19 C. Electric current is moving charge.Ĭompare the electrostatic force to the gravitational force between the proton and electron of a hydrogen atom in its ground (lowest energy) state, in which the proton-electron separation is about 5.3 × 10 -11 m. Accumulated charge on you discharges rapidly into the metal, a "sink" for electrons, producing the shock. A common example you've experienced is getting a shock when you touch something metal, usually in the winter when the air is dry. Static electricity refers to charge that doesn't move unless "triggered" to do so. As the flow-chart above shows, we can divide our discussion about charge into static electricity phenomena and electric current. In the following sections we'll figure out the details of how charges interact and the units of charge. How many times have you been walking down the street and gotten ejected from Earth by gravity? Gravity has no repulsive component it is a purely attractive force. Forces between charges can be attractive or repulsive. This ought to make you pause for a second because it is already vastly different than the gravitational force, our other invisible force. Those always tend to pair up evenly.Ĭharges exert invisible forces on one another in a specific and predictable way. The universe also tends to balance charges in a given system (a defined piece of the universe), there are generally the same number of positive and negative charges.įor example, in a salt crystal consisting of positively charged sodium ions (Na +) and negatively-charged chloride ions (Cl -), it is highly unlikely that we will have an unpaired charge. When the charge of something changes, it's because it loses or gains a negatively-charged electron. In normal processes (things we would encounter in day-to-day life) charges are neither created from nothing nor destroyed. Objects that are neutral may be that way because of their inherent nature, like the neutron, but more commonly they are neutral because they contain equal numbers of negatively-charged particles (electrons) and positively charged ones (protons).Ĭharge is also a conserved quantity. Matter may be positively-charged, negatively-charged or neutral (not charged). We now know those to be negatively-charged electrons. In more controlled experiments, we can observe that charged objects exert invisible forces on one another.īenjamin Franklin, an early researcher in electricity and charge, assigned the label positive to the charges that tend to move the most. We understand charge because we can observe lightning, see sparking between wires and we can get an electric shock when things like fabrics rub together in the dry air of winter. ![]() Electric charge, like mass, is a fundamental property of matter.
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