Comment by mkw5053

2 years ago

First, I am not a physicist. That said, he's my attempt at an answer that satisfies me: Part of the reason is charge quantization. Neither could be some fractional charge. We also observe charge conservation and electromagnetic force laws as described by quantum electrodynamics (QED). These necessitate that the electron and proton charges be precisely balanced for the universe to function as it does.

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mkw5053

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AnimalMuppet  2 years ago

But in fact, quarks are fractionally charged: +2/3 and -1/3.

For this to work, there have to be as many quarks in the proton as the denominator of the quark charge fraction. (And what mechanism forces that?)

And why should the charges on quarks be some nice low-number fraction of the charge on the electron? Why not sqrt(3) or something?

  • rainbowzootsuit  2 years ago

    I think this is more of a historical artifact rather than a fundamental measurement. In the Millikan oil drop experiment he was able to measure quantized units of charge by stripping a single electron from a drop [1], so much later when quarks are figured out they are proportional to the base unit of charge.

    This is similar to how Ben Franklin, having no knowledge of elementary particles, defined the positive and negative polarity of electricity, so we have "electron holes" flowing from the positive end of a battery to the negative end in "conventional current." [2]

    Edit to add: the electron's non-even charge numbers comes into light when you see that the charge is 1.602176634×10−19 Coulombs, where 1C/second= 1 ampere. If we were trying to come up with the definition of an ampere with nice base 10 numbers of electrons this would be much different.

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

    [2] https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Electrical_Engineerin...