After some thought, here is my stab at explaining what electricity "actually" is, at least in a way that works well for classical modelling. (There is a necessa

After some thought, here is my stab at explaining what electricity "actually" is, at least in a way that works well for classical modelling. (There is a necessary amount of handwaving and inaccuracies by omission, but I'm trying to keep it at an ELI5 level). All matter is composed of squintillions of tiny things called "atoms", which are composed of a core having a certain positive integer (its atomic number) that represents its charge and a certain number of tinier things whizzing around the core called electrons. If the number of electrons whizzing around an atom's core is not the same as the atomic number, the atom gets mad and will either try to fob excess electrons off to surrounding atoms or steal them from surrounding atoms (depending on if it has more or fewer electrons than ideal). Thus, if you decide to pick a few atoms and kick electrons out of them, it starts a chain reaction of electron motion that is observable on the macroscopic scale. These chain reaction is an electron current, which is measured as going in the opposite direction of the way electrons flow because Benjamin Franklin guessed wrong. The number of electrons flowing in unit time is the current (as a measurement), measured in amps (approximately 10 million trillion electrons per second). It also turns out that you can vary how ferociously these electrons are hitting atoms: the voltage (amount of energy per ~10 million trillion electrons). Different materials are better or worse at absorbing (or resisting, if you will) the ferocity of electrons, and this is the resistance. If the resistance is high enough, it basically becomes impossible for the electrons to flow, and you get an insulator. But how do you get the electrons to start moving in the first place? The easiest to explain involves chemical reactions: sometimes, atoms decide they'd rather be in a different orientation, and in the process of moving to that orientation, they need to emit some electrons first. With some cleverness, you can set things up so that electrons have to go around the "long way" (through a wire), and something that is set up to be able to do this is more commonly known as a "battery." The other main way you can do it is by creating changing magnetic fields, which are kind of created by changing electric currents, and explaining this in more detail basically requires throwing away everything I've described, starting from scratch with the actual physics, and still coming to the realization that mathematical equations are not satisfactory answers to the question "what is it."