Answer to Question #133105 in Electricity and Magnetism for alfraid

Question

explain quantization of electric charge.

Answer 1

Consider a LEGO model. Assume that all bricks in the model are the same. As a whole it represents something complete, call it a charge. What does this car consist of? It is made of small bricks. You can disassemble your model to individual bricks, but you can't separate these small pieces further.

The same about charge: an electrical charge (a model) consists of electrons (bricks) - indivisible (in this context) pieces that make them a larger charge. You can remove or add whole electrons to an object, but you cannot add or remove 2/3 of an electron or a half of electron.

The fact that electrical charges can contain only integer number of electrons is called quantization of electric charge. To figure out how many electrons a charge has, simply divide the given charge (measured in Coulombs) by the charge of an electron (1.609⋅10^-19C).