Electric universe

Debunking the Electric Universe

To debunk the electric universe, we must first understand what the electric universe is, what is gravity and what is electromagnetism.

What is the electric universe?

People who believe in the electric universe believe a range of things which differ from group to group. A list of some of the beliefs that these groups have can be found at https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe as well as a more in-depth discussion about the theory. The people who spread this theory (pseudoscience) do so by using scientific jargon improperly to confuse the average person who doesn’t have an in-depth knowledge of physics. If you wish to see how they do this first hand, then you can go to their website: https://www.electricuniverse.info/. For our purposes we will focus on Immanuel Velikovsky (an electric universe believer) who believed that gravity was the result of electromagnetism [1] as this leads to an experiment which we can do at home to disprove him.

What is gravity?

Gravity is the phenomenon of objects being attracted to each other. The gravitational force is what causes the planets in our solar system to orbit our Sun, the moon to orbit the Earth and even causes massive enough stars to collapse into black holes at the end of their lives. The gravitational force experienced by an object due to another object is given by the Newton’s Law of gravitation:

Where ‘F’ is the gravitational force, ‘G’ is the gravitational constant, ‘m’ is the mass of each object (1&2) and ‘d’ is the distance from one object to the other. As we can see this formula does not depend on the charge of each object, this is indicative of the electric universe not being correct.

If you wish to learn more about gravity, a great place to start is https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/what-is-gravity/en/. Nasa’s webpage is filled with great pictures to help visualise gravity and its effects.

What is electromagnetism?

Electromagnetism is the study of the interactions between charged objects. Initially electricity and magnetism were treated as separate phenomena until James Maxwell showed that they were due to the same interaction. This interaction became the electromagnetic force and is one of the fundamental forces. When a charged object is stationary it creates an electric field around it which causes charged particles to experience a force with like charges (e.g., two positively charged objects) repelling each other and opposite (e.g., a positively and a negatively charged object) to attract; when a charged object is moving it generates a magnetic field which also interacts with charged particles. Now you may already know that light (and all other electromagnetic waves) is made up electromagnetic fields that flow all around us, one that is easy to test for is our phone signal, which runs off radio waves, which we will use to test our experiment set up later.

Experiment And Set Up

If gravity is the result of electromagnetism, we should expect objects to become weightless when we block electromagnetic fields. This is the basis for our home experiment.

This experiment will use a Faraday cage, a phone that shows if it has signal, a scale, and an object you wish to weigh. To build a Faraday cage and learn more about them: https://sciencing.com/build-Faraday-cage-6618709.html. Once you have these pieces of equipment, we must first test our Faraday cage. To do this place your phone inside of the cage, you should notice that your phone signal starts to drop (it’s okay if it doesn’t block the signal completely). The signal dropping means that the Faraday cage is (at least partially) blocking electromagnetic fields. We can now start our experiment.

Procedure:

1. Place your object that you want to weight on the scales, write down the weight.

2. Take the object off and place the Faraday cage on the scales (if the cage is too big you can put the scales inside as long as you can read them) and zero the scales.

3. Place the object inside the Faraday cage (or on the scales if you’ve put the scales inside the cage) and write down the weight.

4. Compare the weight with and without the cage, has it changed?

You should notice that the objects weight hasn’t changed, this means that an objects weight isn’t influenced by electromagnetism and as an extension, neither is gravity. So well done! You’ve just disproved the electric universe.

References

[1] [Online]. Available: https://www.velikovsky.info/cosmos-without-gravitation/.