Talk:Elementary charge

Article Checklist for "Elementary charge"

Workgroup category or categories	Physics Workgroup [Please add or review categories]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	Not specified
Basic cleanup done?	No
Checklist last edited by	--Paul Wormer 06:41, 10 November 2007 (CST)

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I would suggest that this article is removed because it will cause too much confusion. Since the discovery of quarks it is known that the electron charge is not the elementary charge of nature even though it remains a very useful quantity and outside particle physics is the smallest charge you will encounter. However calling it the elementary charge is wrong but describing 1/3e as the elementary charge will probably be confusing without a lot of discussion. Roger Moore 22:53, 11 November 2007 (CST)

• I understand that quarks are never free, so that the elementary ( = proton) charge is the smallest entity of free charge found in nature? Further, I would not delete this article, because the concept and name "elementary charge", although it may be a misnomer, is still ubiquitous in tables of fundamental physical constants [e.g. Physics Today, 56(8), p. BG8, (2003), http://iupac.org/goldbook/E02032.pdf and http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/e/elementarycharge.htm ], textbooks, and such. Why don't you add a paragraph with the latest particle physics views on the quark charge? It is not so difficult to understand, because everybody knows that atoms were once thought indivisible, and with higher observational energies they turned out not to be so. The same for atomic nuclei. Why would the elementary charge not show the same behavior (and still keep its name, like an atom is still called an atom)?--Paul Wormer 01:36, 12 November 2007 (CST)