Re: electric charge

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Larry Cartwright wrote:

> William Beaty wrote:
> > I've encountered people who think that electric current is "real", and
> > that electric charge is just an abstract concept.   Very weird.  (The flow
> > rate of a substance is more real than the substance which flows?!!!)
>
> I'm probably getting in over my head here, (and I'm praying that someone
> more highly informed and articulate will snatch up my banner and carry
> it victorious to the finish line) but I am compelled to object to the
> 19th century characterization of electrical charge as a "substance".


 Big  :)


And is "energy" just a property?  I see that many of the arguments are the
same regarding the substance-like character of both energy and of charge.
We can't have "pure charge" or "pure energy" not associated with
particles.

I'd agree that the red color of paint is just a property, and I'd agree
that water is a substance.  If you want to remove the water from a bottle,
you have to transport water out through the mouth of the bottle.  However,
water isn't such an ideal example, since we could instead split the water
into H2 and O2.  The water would vanish from the interior, yet no water
would exit from the bottle's mouth.

If we want to remove matter from an enclosed volume, or remove negative
charge, we have no options except to pass the Coulombs or Kilograms
through the boundaries defining that volume.  That's why I claim that
charge is a substance.

Or here's another idea.  To get rid of the red color of paint, just heat
the paint up by a few hundred degrees.  The color of the paint is just a
property.  OK, now try to make the charge of an electrified object go
away.  Can't be done.  We can transport the charge away, but we can't
otherwise change it.  Whatever "charge" may be, it certainly isn't a
property like the red color of paint.  And it has a far greater
substancelike persistance than any everyday substance.


> Is
> not electrical charge a *property* of the elementary particles which
> make up what we call substance, the quarks and leptons and bosons, etc?
> To me, calling charge a substance is like insisting that blue is a
> substance, or foul-smelling is a substance or strangeness is a
> substance.  How have I erred in my conceptualization of the sub-atomic
> structure of the Universe?


Too bad we cannot perform some grammar engineering.  Besides "property"
and "substance", we need a third term which could apply to mass, charge,
energy, etc.  Create a new word "propstance," then make everyone start
using it. :)  Conserved "properties" are even more substance-like than
most everyday substances.  Saying that charge is "just" a property is very
misleading because that hides its profoundly substance-like character.


I have to admit that my working with electronics has biased me in favor of
the charge-as-substance idea.  An ampere can exist in metal, in plasma,
and in battery electrolyte, and in all three cases we have a flow of
charge.  Yet in all three cases we have different particles flowing.  And
if metal wires connect the current to a neon sign, or to an electroplating
tank, then "charge" happily flows across the boundaries even though the
flowing particles must hand off the charge to other particles.


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