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If gravity is really the bending of space/time causing objects with mass to experience acceleration, is there a similar physical meaning to 'charge' besides 'a property of matter which causes it to experience a force when placed in an electric field.' What exactly is charge?

Hunter
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Shookster
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    Possibly related to http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/111761/ – Hunter Jun 11 '14 at 00:18
  • What exactly is an electric field? – Alfred Centauri Jun 11 '14 at 00:36
  • So...similar to the warped rubber sheet analogy with gravity, is the bending of spacetime caused by the charge-related terms in the stress tensor field equations what causes positive charges to be attracted to negative charges while being repulsed by other positive charges? – Shookster Jun 11 '14 at 00:58
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    You may be in the interested in the beautiful book "Artifical Black Holes" By Grigori Volovik, Mario Novello and Matt Visser. It explores some of these ideas in great detail, i.e, given enough electromagnetic charge can one produce event horizons analogous to the gravitational case – Arthur Suvorov Jun 11 '14 at 01:07
  • What would an explanation of charge in terms other than it's effects look like? I mean, you are not expecting charge to actually be a something like a microscopic gear that you can understand intuitively on the basis of your macroscopic experience are you? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jun 14 '14 at 17:58
  • Dmckee: I fully believe that the entire purpose of scientific discovery is to build accurate mental models like 'gears' which give us the ability to understand not just the what but the how and why. We aren't done until we do. – Shookster Jun 14 '14 at 22:36
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    possible duplicate of What is charge? – garyp Jul 06 '14 at 12:45
  • Answer here: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/800697/226902 – Quillo Mar 07 '24 at 14:03

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What charge isn't ( or doesn't seem to be so far) is something that has properties similar to gravitation in that its fundamental effect is based on curving space-time, as in general relativity. There have been theoretical attempts to formulate a theory of electromagnetism that resembles general relativity (such as the Kaluza-Klein theory and other more recent theories along similar lines).

But so far, such theories have not been verified with experimental observations, such as the particle physics experiments done at CERN. That's not to say they never will be , just that so far there is not sufficient experimental evidence to say charge works like gravitation in this way.

The theory that so far seems to have the strongest experimental verification is quantum electrodynamics (QED), in which the charge is a quantized property of matter (i.e charge does not come in any smaller units than the charge of an electron or positron, with the exception of quarks, which have one-third or two-thirds the charge of an electron or positron). The electromagnetic force in QED arises from the exchange of virtual photons between charged particles.

It's hard to give a better qualitative explanation within the scope of the question without digging further into QED (and that would entail some deep digging), but hopefully this is helpful.

paisanco
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  • Nice. Looking at the string theories many dimensions, is the electrical interaction related to specific dimensions? – WalyKu Jun 11 '14 at 09:37
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Well what is mass in this case? Just because you can see in the macroscopic world the effect of mass doesn't mean what you think of it is tangible. Its the same thing with charge. Charge is just an intrinsic quantum number that nature chooses to interact with through the EM field. The same with mass, wherever "mass" comes from (vacuum energy, higgs mechanism etc) it is really a property which defines the coupling strength of gravity. It equally as abstract as charge is, but we are way more familiar with mass in our everyday lives.

PhotonBoom
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This is a personal oppinion, not available in textbooks. AFAIK there is no answer to that question.
An electron collides with a positron, both have charges and the resulting gamma rays (light) do not have charge.
Your question can be upgraded to the one: Light is charged ?
I'm tempted to say yes. Light has both charges at the same time.
The inverse process is also valid : two gamma rays collide giving an electron and a positron.
As seen, charge is present before light was created and also after it was destroyed. In between, in the light phase, both charges should be there.
What is charge? I dont know, yet. One operational answer can be: charge is the origin of the electromagnetic field. (more than what you said: it responds to an electric field)

Helder Velez
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