Protons and Electrons Carry Positive and Negative Electrical Charges

There’s one primary driving force behind all the chemical activity that makes life and cooking possible, and that’s the electrical attraction between protons and electrons. Protons carry a positive electrical charge, and electrons an exactly balancing negative charge. (The neutral neutron carries no charge.) Opposite electrical charges attract each other; similar electrical charges repel each other. In each atom, protons in the central nucleus attract a cloud of electrons that orbit constantly at various distances from the nucleus. Stable forms of the elements are electrically neutral, which means that their atoms contain equal numbers of protons and electrons.