Whats the defining characteristics of an electrical charge?
“What defines an electrical charge as positive or negative?” Absolutely nothing but convention and tradition! Positive and Negative are just names. It was originally noticed that there were exactly two types of electric charge, and (perhaps unfortunately) they were called positive and negative. If we called electrons positive and protons negative it wouldn’t make any difference, the choice is arbitrary. When we do physics calculations with +ve and -ve charges, we could replace all the positives with negatives, and all the negatives with positives, and the answer would be exactly the same!
