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Hear me out. When asked what is mass made of, I can roughly say it is the interaction between the particle and higgs field or energy of quarks, boson, what have you. Now I ask what is charge made of? How can I describe this phenomenon with or without electric field? Because charge give rise to electric field but it is not the electric field.

user6760
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  • See also JamalS's answer to What is charge actually? How to define it? – John Rennie Feb 24 '20 at 05:56
  • @JohnRennie: so in a sense it is just like asking what is temperature made of? If so yes that's answer my question for the moment. – user6760 Feb 24 '20 at 05:59
  • There is no significant difference between my answer here and the highest-voted answers to the linked questions. Why are you thinking about temperature? You should be thinking “coupling constant to EM field”. – G. Smith Feb 24 '20 at 06:06
  • I cannot resist referring you to this answer of mine to a similar question https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16048/what-are-quarks-made-of/16050#16050 , the poem part. – anna v Feb 24 '20 at 07:55
  • Since you accepted the answer, I still have a question for you, "the charge of their quanta simply expresses the strength of those interactions" . how is charge quantized ? and also Feynman diagram shows, two electrons interacting using a photon, again how I see electrons are they are just a charge. You mean to say that charges(electric field alone) are not responsible for the repulsion/attraction but the interaction of electric and electromagnetic field is what caused the observed effect ? – DJphy Oct 23 '20 at 02:12

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In my opinion, most physicists would consider this a meaningless question. Charge is not “made of” anything. It is merely one of the properties of some elementary particles, and it quantifies how strongly their field couples to the electromagnetic field.

In quantum field theory, charge does not “give rise to” the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field is one of the seventeen fundamental quantum fields in the Standard Model, and it exists separate from, and independent of, the other sixteen fundamental fields. Ten of these other fields interact with it, and the charge of their quanta simply expresses the strength of those interactions.

One can easily imagine a charge-free universe in which the electromagnetic field is the only quantum field. Photons would still have been produced by the Big Bang, and that universe would be filled with them just like ours is.

G. Smith
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  • Does this analogy helps: quantum field is just like a glass of water and charge is like a spoon stirring that water? Then what is the spoon representing? – user6760 Feb 24 '20 at 06:33
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    I’m sorry, but that analogy is not meaningful to me. – G. Smith Feb 24 '20 at 06:34
  • I still have a question here, "the charge of their quanta simply expresses the strength of those interactions" . how is charge quantized ? and also Feynman diagram shows, two electrons interacting using a photon, again how I see electrons are they are just a charge. You mean to say that charges(electric field alone) are not responsible for the repulsion/attraction but the interaction of electric and electromagnetic field is what caused the observed effect ? – DJphy Oct 23 '20 at 02:11