What causes the charge of an electron?

It's part of the Illuminati plot to rule the world.

 

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If an electron has charge and mass, how can it be a single particle? Does an electron being a single particle, mean that charge and mass are the same thing, but differ only in terms of their degrees of freedom?

 

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Clearly you completely failed to grasp my point. I don't need a model to see that SciWriter doesn't have one. For instance, I'm not a doctor but I know homoeopathy is a pile of crap.

I can provide the mainstream way of starting with an uncharged particle and wanting it to be invariant under a local U(1) symmetry, which leads through to the existence of a massless vector field whose equations of motion are the electromagnetic Maxwell equations and which interacts with the original particle in such a way as to be precisely the sort of thing seen in electron-photon interactions. Charge is then the measure of how much the photon field's vector potential space-time dependency affects the phase of the electron field. This formulation, along with second quantisation and renormalisation, is how you construct quantum electrodynamics, the most accurate and tested physical model ever constructed. It actually has experimental validation and testing, with real world applications. SciWriter is just throwing out buzzwords, buzzwords he can't even define when asked. He's just making noise in an attempt to con those with little or no physics knowledge into thinking he's not one of them.

 

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AlphaNumeric in your first post in this thread you first quoted one of my posts. Your response was accurate and yet missed the point of my post. My error as I was apparently unclear. My point was or should have been that interested lay people should be able to ask questions and forward opinions and ideas and expect to be taken serious by 'the experts'.

After that you began a critical review of SciWriters posts. And while some of what you have posted had some merit it missed the point. SciWriter's first post (#7) was a response to one of my posts. The one just preceding. He even began with a quote of the pertinent sentence. "Answers can be all over the place."

I accepted his post as example of just that. As it was my belief was his intent. I did not get the impression that he was attempting to answer that original question. He seemed to me, to be as I said earlier, responding to my post.

The thread's question remains unanswered.

 

Ya, you're right.

 

The buzzwords will be defined in time.

Meanwhile, the "Why Anything?" post written in plain language is apparently not refutable.

 

Now that we know of this zero-balance requirement, we might use it as a reason for the necessity of conservation laws, in some way.


It's getting harder to separate the heat from the light in this thread. But to the careful observer it still sparkles with brief and inspired insights.


I was thinking last night that charge might have something to do with symmetry, or more precisely Asymmetry, and thus perhaps the above mentioned connection to conservation laws. There's something afterall very binary about--either negative OR positive, like an on/off switch, or chirality, as in left OR right. When we look at the brain, this sort of binary exclusivity of charge seems the basis of neural firing--neurons existing in potentiated OR depotentiated states. Anyway, just an intuitive and highly unspecialized conjecture here. For myself I'm still trying to understand how photons tie into charge.

 

Me too. Are photons neutral because they contain both a positive and negative charge?

 

Yeah...you're right. But sometimes I have what some might call an unrealistic faith in the power of language to make things clear. Example: just now we have reached a common understanding on why an explanation often requires a background of specialized knowledge to even make sense. Going thru a set of algrebraic simplifications may make self-evident certain definitions that to most everyone else will seem totally counterintuitive and insupportable. I get that. And yet that perspective was granted totally by the reasoning power of everyday speech--a sort of layman's philosophical inquiry into the nature of scientific explanations. So I'll take you at your word that "charge" has one of these abstract phenomenally-unapparent explanations that can only be appreciated with adequate scientific training. Perhaps for untrained minds understanding WHY something cannot be understood is at least a small step towards understanding it more than we did.

 

Photons don’t have charge. Read the physical properties of a photon in Wikipedia.

The photon is the gauge boson for electromagnetism. Physics explains the forces of nature by exchange of gauge particles. Gauge particles are exchanged between other particle like quarks and leptons. When an electron attracts or repels there is a force carrying field between them. In this case the field is composed of photons. Particles interacting electromagnetically constantly exchange photons between them.

 

Very interesting! Would it be fair then to say that charge is light, or at least light-like?

 

If you are genuinely interested then you should watch all of these videos. Professor Lewin makes even the boring stuff interesting.

MIT Video Lectures

 

I'm enjoying this. Keep going.

Disclaimer: I don't do math so I won't do math.
IMHO we have models. Wonderful functional models.
Is it true that one reliable repeatable unpredictable observation would require a rewrite?
It seems that conclusions are being drawn from suppositions that cannot be experimentally vereified.
Call me old fashioned but I like to see results in a lab.
Are we really way beyond that?

Told you I don't do math.
Dee Cee

 

Only in those areas of science where experiments are not practical. That includes the area covered by this thread. What we know of both the macrocosm and microcosm, i.e. GR and QM must be filtered through the theories we believe at the time as they both involve things outside of the scope of direct observation.

 

With the greatest respect.

"Only in those areas of science where experiments are not practical."

If you can't verify your hypothisis how is it science as opposed to speculation.
Dee Cee

 

Boundless space, overall electric neutrality, and conservation of energy, momentum, and charge leads inexorably to nothingness. The zero-equation is the reason the universe is the way it is, the reason why the universe must be the way it is, and the reason why it is. The universe is the perfect zero-sum equation.

Zero and infinity, the smallest and the largest, both lead to nonexistence, and so our finite existence cannot be there, but must be at its midpoint; zero and infinity lead to many of the same problems in algebra and cosmology. They are the same thing: nonexistence.

Infinity * 0 = 1 and 0 = 1 / infinity. (In 1D space)

Still enjoying?

 

exactly!

 

I do not know. It seems to me either you don't know.

 

I don't give a toss if you disagree. If they guy wants answers to questions relating to physics, he needs to go study physics.

Also, the question is rather pointless. The charge on an electron is what it is, period.

 

This.


I can't believe this thread is already 3 pages long.

The real answer was provided by those with the least knowledge of physics.

Some things we just don't know why, they just are and seem to be true and consistent based on measurements. It may be that Quantum or String Theory (or future theories) will eventually explain exactly why the electron is charged and why it has the specific amount of charge it does, but really for now ... :shrug:

It very much like asking what caused the Big Bang....