What is a charge?

Question

Please describe and explain what a charge is. I want to know what it is in reality: Is it a dense region in space? Is it imaginary? What it is it? And I'd like to know why there are interactions between charges? Thanks!

Answer 1

Charge (the regular garden variety of charge) is a property of an object that causes it to interact with other objects with that property via the electromagnetic interaction.

That may not be an extremely satisfying definition, but it's the best you can do.

Science isn't big on answering "why" questions.  "What" and "how" is fine, but "why" typically gets you nowhere, as anyone who talks to a toddler knows.  I could answer that charged particles interact by exchanging photons.  But then you'd just ask why the charged particles are interacting with the photons.  And there's no answer to that.  And even if there were, it would just lead to another question that wouldn't have an answer.

My stock answer to these questions is to invoke fairies to explain the forces, that being as good an explanation as any.  But I'm not in a smart-a ss mood at the moment, so I hope you appreciate the answer.  I'll leave to others the task of explaining the gluotronic theory as applied to charges.