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Comment by geggam | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me when I read it. We take it down to the proton neutron and electron stating they are charged with positive negative or neutral charge.... but what are they charged with ?

Electricity ? What is it made of ?

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It's made of the electromagnetic force. We can measure it and characterize it very accurately with mathematics. We can say what it isn't (gravity or the weak force or the strong force), but we cannot say what the electromagnetic force is. Sorry. If you figure it out you'll get a Nobel Prize.

> We can say what it isn't (gravity or the weak force or the strong force)

Isn't the electric and the weak force considered the same force these days? See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction

Physics runs out of "why"s somewhere around the question-asking ability of a clever 5-year-old, and becomes "here's the math to describe what happens" the rest of the way. Electric charge and all the other forces (AFAIK) just are.

They aren't "charged with" anything. Some elementary particles happen to interact with one another in a particular and consistent way, and we label them according to how they behave with something we call charge.

Electric charge is fundamental.

We say that a macroscopic body is “electrically charged” when there is an excess (or a lack) of electrons in it - which merely creates a disbalance between the electrons and the protons. We say that an elementary particle is electrically charged to indicate that there is a nonzero probability of it emitting or absorbing a photon (which leads to creation of the electromagnetic force).

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