Why is the electric charge of a body quantised?

When a scientist refers to a property as being quantized (charge, energy, etc.), what they mean is that the property can only have discrete values; the distinction between discrete and continuous values is best illustrated with an example of each.

Distance can be conceptualized as a continuous property by thinking about a scenario in which you are driving from your house to your school and your school is exactly one kilometer away. During your drive, you could be anywhere between your house and the school; you could be half a kilometer away (0.5 km), one third of a kilometer away (0.33 km), or even more precisely, 0.4773822 km way.

To illustrate a discrete property, let's say we are going up ten stairs. We can be on stair 1, or 2, or 3, and so on, but we cannot be on stair number two and a half, stair number 6.8743. Hence, the possible values for stair numbers are discrete, or quantized.

Let's now examine this distinction in relation to electric charge. To put it simply, charge is determined by the total number of protons and electrons. An object is negatively charged if it has more electrons than protons. The question then becomes, "How much negative charge"?

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The quantization of electric charge is a fundamental property arising from the discrete nature of elementary particles, specifically electrons and protons, which carry charges in multiples of the elementary charge (approximately (1.602 \times 10^{-19}) coulombs). This quantization is a consequence of the quantized nature of charge carriers in the atomic and subatomic levels.