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Electromagnetic forces are tremendously stronger than gravity, but tend to cancel out so that for astronomical-scale bodies, gravity dominates. Electrical and magnetic phenomena have been observed since ancient times, but it was only in the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell discovered that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of the same ...
Diagram regarding the confirmation of gravitomagnetism by Gravity Probe B. Gravitoelectromagnetism, abbreviated GEM, refers to a set of formal analogies between the equations for electromagnetism and relativistic gravitation; specifically: between Maxwell's field equations and an approximation, valid under certain conditions, to the Einstein field equations for general relativity.
Unification of theories about observable fundamental phenomena of nature is one of the primary goals of physics. [1] [2] [3] The two great unifications to date are Isaac Newton’s unification of gravity and astronomy, and James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electromagnetism; the latter has been further unified with the concept of electroweak interaction.
For the cases of time-independent gravity and electromagnetism, the fields are gradients of corresponding potentials =, = so substituting these into Gauss' law for each case obtains =, = = where ρ g is the mass density , ρ e the charge density , G the gravitational constant and k e = 1/4πε 0 the electric force constant.
In Kaluza–Klein theory, the gravitational curvature of the extra spatial direction behaves as an additional force similar to electromagnetism. These and other models of electromagnetism and gravity were pursued by Albert Einstein in his attempts at a classical unified field theory. By 1930 Einstein had already considered the Einstein-Maxwell ...
When the equivalent of Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism is formulated within the framework of Einstein's theory of general relativity, the electromagnetic field energy (being equivalent to mass as defined by Einstein's equation E=mc 2) contributes to the stress tensor and thus to the curvature of space-time, which is the general ...
The force on a test particle subject only to gravity and electromagnetism is = +, where p α is the linear 4-momentum of the particle, t is any time coordinate parameterizing the world line of the particle, Γ β αγ is the Christoffel symbol (gravitational force field), and q is the electric charge of the particle.
As the electromagnetic field is characterized by an antisymmetric rank-2 tensor, there is an obvious possibility for a unified theory: a nonsymmetric tensor composed of a symmetric part representing gravity, and an antisymmetric part that represents electromagnetism. Research in this direction ultimately proved fruitless; the desired classical ...