Insane Clown Posse was not really wrong about magnets, by the way.

No one — and I mean no one at all — really understands how or why electromagnetic charge is a thing. It’s just a fact of the universe. There is no deeper understanding and may never be one. Yeah, physicists will prattle on about Noether’s Theorem and gauge symmetry and all that but that doesn’t really explain anything, but is just a very convoluted way of saying this: “Charge emerges from how the universe is, and we don’t know why, but here is a circular definition that convinces those without the mental horsepower to understand it that we know more than we do.”

As I’ve become more capable of understanding more and more of science over the years, it turns out that a lot of it is like that. That is, it’s deliberate obfuscation to conceal lack of knowledge from the hoi polloi, rather than explanatory.