Right I've wondered about this for years- perhaps Capuchan will know - or someone else.

What makes a positive particle positive and a negative one negative? I know about electrons, protons and all the odd quarks/leptons etc. But what makes these have the properties they have? Does anyone know? Is there an answer?

You can go into loads of detail if you want / give me paper ref to look up myself (I have access to loads of journals) but I don't know where to start myself, have to admit not very strong at physics :o

Thanks for any help

Well, as for protons, they are made up of quarks which have fractional charges. Same for neutrons. They have a neutral charge but are made up of charged quarks which cancel each other out.

As for your question, I'm afraid that at the moment nobody really knows! It's like mass. Nobody know why particles have mass. In same same way, nobody knows why particles have charge. It's a fundamental property of matter.

Sorry

Argh thought so but wanted to check - I've been looking for the answer for years. Just wanted to know whether I'd overlooked something obvious. I suppose I'll just have to wait until some bright spark figures an experiment which can work it out. Probably when someone works out the fundemental particles aren't that fundemental...

Yep, just keep getting smaller. But I'm sure that will just complicate issues further. When we discovered quarks we discovered other properties, color and strangeness. These properties don't show themselves on the macro scale as most macro particles are color and strangeness neutral.

What other properties of particles are we going to find that aren't detectable on the quark scale? The mind boggles :)