Hear me out. When asked what is mass made of, I can roughly say it is the interaction between the particle and higgs field or energy of quarks, boson, what have you. Now I ask what is charge made of? How can I describe this phenomenon with or without electric field? Because charge give rise to electric field but it is not the electric field.
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In my opinion, most physicists would consider this a meaningless question. Charge is not “made of” anything. It is merely one of the properties of some elementary particles, and it quantifies how strongly their field couples to the electromagnetic field.
In quantum field theory, charge does not “give rise to” the electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field is one of the seventeen fundamental quantum fields in the Standard Model, and it exists separate from, and independent of, the other sixteen fundamental fields. Ten of these other fields interact with it, and the charge of their quanta simply expresses the strength of those interactions.
One can easily imagine a charge-free universe in which the electromagnetic field is the only quantum field. Photons would still have been produced by the Big Bang, and that universe would be filled with them just like ours is.
G. Smith
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