Lauren,

Mass and charge are two utterly disconnected properties of matter.

But aside from that:

* Any ponderable object (an object with mass) can be charged. Or not.

* No evidence exists for negative mass objects (but charge comes in both signs)

* Charge is quantized - mass might not be.

* Charges couple via virtual photons. Masses do not.

Both electrostatic and gravitational fields (in the non-Relativistic limit) obey the inverse-square law, which you can treat as a simple consequence of us living in a universe with three spatial dimensions.

James Garry Thanks! I apologize if this is a trivial question (I'm not a physics major if you couldn't tell), but why is the inverse-square law a consequence of living in three spatial dimensions?

Lauren,

Imagine a very fancy ornamental fountain. It sprays water uniformly in *all* directions (don't ask how the pipework is laid out - magic might be needed).

Don some wet weather gear and now imagine a spherical shell around that fancy fountain.

Take a marker, and somewhere on that shell draw a square. Measure the amount of water that hits that square each second, and call that volume W_1.

Remove that spherical shell and replace it with another one that has *twice* the diameter of the first one. And like before, draw a square on this new shell - of exactly the same size as the first square.

And again, with the fountain running, record how much water hits that square on this bigger shell per second. Call that volume W_2.

You'll find an odd thing. W_2 is *four* times smaller than W_1.

And if you had a third shell, three times as wide as the first, then the same size square on this triply-sized shell would receiver 1/9th of the water per second as the first shell.

This is a consequence of how area of the shell changes with radius; and the conservation of 'stuff'.

If 'stuff' is conserved, then the area of the shell multiplied by the unit area flux must be a constant.

In other dimensions flatland, for eg, the area scales as radius to the first power.

Hi, Lauren,

I just registered in ResearchGate and found your project for researching the relation between gravitation and electromagnetism. I have also been curious about this question for a long time ago. I think the following might help:

* First, maybe you know the classical formula: q2 = 2 α h ε0 c, which defines the electric charge in terms of the fine structure constant, α, Planck's constant, h, vacuum permittivity, ε0, and the speed of light, c.

* In one of my papers I have explained that it is possible to interpret the permittivity of vacuum as the inverse of the speed of light, with which the elementary electric charge can be expressed simply as the square root of twice the product of the fine structure constant (fst) by Planck's constant. This for macroscopic applications. Whereas for the interior of the particles it seems that the fst is equal to 1.

* With the previous, in another paper that you can find here in ResearchGate, I have expressed all the electric and magnetic units in terms of only mass, length and time. This means that there is a close relation between charge and mass, which is still unknown to Physics.

* Also, the past week I found an interesting answer in Quora (I suppose that it is only in Spanish) from Daniel Sanchez-Molina where he expresses that, using the Reissner-Nordstrom metric, which is like an extension of the Schwarzchild metric, the electric charge works as a gravitational mass of value: M_q=q2/(4 π ε0 r c2).

* When you insert my definition of electric charge for the interior of the particle (without the fst) this formula simplifies to just the electron mass, which I found as VERY important.

* It would seem that Reissner-Nordstrom is cancelling the inertial mass, which is positive, with the electric mass, considered as anti-gravitational. In my intuition, I do not agree with this.

* Whereas, when you insert my definition of electric charge for the exterior of the particle, the definition for M_q results depending on the distance to the charged particle, which is also doubtful.