--- title: "Electric Gravity — Thornhill's Dipole Theory" --- Gravity is the one force the Electric Universe does not treat as fundamental. In Wal Thornhill's model there is no separate "gravitational interaction" at all: gravity is a **faint residue of electricity** — the tiny leftover attraction between subatomic particles that an electric field has stretched into aligned dipoles. If that is right, two startling consequences follow, and they are the consequences the rest of EU cosmology leans on: **mass becomes an electrical variable**, and **gravity acts very nearly instantaneously**. This page lays out the model in Thornhill's own terms, traces the lineage he draws on and shows where it plugs into the wider theory. ## The model: gravity as a residual dipole force Thornhill's definitive statement is the essay **"Electric Gravity in an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE"** (holoscience.com, 22 August 2008, adapted from a 2007 talk in Cambridge, England). Its claim, in his words: > "Gravity is due to radially oriented electrostatic dipoles inside the Earth's protons, neutrons and electrons." The picture is this. Place any particle in a gravitational field and it distorts very slightly — the centres of its positive and negative charge separate, making a minuscule **electric dipole** that points toward the attracting body. Dipoles attract dipoles, and Thornhill argues that when you sum this dipole-dipole force over all the aligned particles in two extended bodies, the geometry turns a steep short-range law into the familiar inverse-square law of gravity: > "The force between any two aligned electrostatic dipoles varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance… the dipole-dipole force… becomes the familiar inverse square force of gravity for extended bodies." The model claims this explains gravity's most puzzling feature — its extraordinary weakness — as a measure of how *little* particles distort. Thornhill puts the weakness vividly: gravity is, verbatim, *"one thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion times less than the electrostatic force."* (Taken literally that phrase reads as ~10⁵¹; the figure usually cited — for the electron–proton pair — is about **10³⁹**, with standard physics giving ~10³⁶ to ~10⁴² depending on the particles. We quote him as written and flag the discrepancy rather than silently adjusting it.) Because the same dipole distortion produces both the pull a body feels and its resistance to being moved, the model also claims to explain *why gravitational and inertial mass are identical* — the long-standing "equivalence" that General Relativity takes as a postulate. ## Mass as an electrical variable Here is the claim that makes electric gravity matter for the rest of EU theory: > "The mass of a body is an electrical variable—just like a proton in a particle accelerator. Therefore, the so-called gravitational constant—G… is a variable! That is why G is so difficult to pin down." If a body's mass depends on the charge distortion of its particles, then **changing a body's electrical environment changes its gravity.** Thornhill draws the corollaries hard: a measured mass "cannot tell us about composition" (so "we cannot say what the Sun is made from"); comets "register masses that should have them constructed like an empty sponge yet they look like solid rock," because their charge state suppresses their gravitational mass. In *"Newton's Electric Clockwork Solar System"* (2009) he adds claimed corroborations — Saturn's anomalously low bulk density, and fossil-biomechanics arguments (citing engineer L. Endersbee) that surface gravity was *lower* in the age of the dinosaurs. He even entertains **antigravity**: anything disrupting a spinning body's induced dipoles "will exhibit antigravity effects," citing the contested superconductor gravity-shielding experiments. *These are the speculative edge of the model and are presented strictly as his claims.* ## The speed of gravity, and the lineage Thornhill cites Newton's law has no time delay in it, and Thornhill takes that literally: gravity, he argues, propagates near-instantaneously because the underlying electric force does. > "Gravitationally, the Earth sees the Sun where it is this instant, not where it was more than 8 minutes ago." His stated authority is the astronomer **Tom Van Flandern**, whose paper *"The speed of gravity — What the experiments say"* (*Physics Letters A* 250, 1998) argued from the absence of orbital aberration that gravity must travel at a lower bound of **2×10¹⁰ c** — twenty billion times light-speed. (Van Flandern's argument revives a much older bound of Laplace's; note that Laplace is *not* named in Thornhill's essay — the argument reaches EU through Van Flandern. Van Flandern was an independent dissident astronomer, not an EU member.) The deeper model Thornhill borrows is **Ralph Sansbury's**: that every "fundamental" particle is really a resonant system of tinier orbiting charges ("subtrons"), so that forces between particles are transmitted near-instantly by resonance. Thornhill credits Sansbury's idea while parting from him on one point — Thornhill keeps light slow and transverse while gravity is fast and longitudinal: *"Light travels slowly like the transverse ripples on a pond surface; gravity travels swiftly and longitudinally, like the speed of sound in water."* His other cited touchstones are **Weber-type electrodynamics** (via Assis & Clemente, 1992), and historical calls for an electromagnetic origin of inertia from **Oliver Lodge** (1921) and **Henri Poincaré** (1914: "all inertia [is] of electromagnetic origin"). *(Le Sage push-gravity, sometimes attributed to EU, is not cited by Thornhill.)* ### Watch: Thornhill on gravity - [**Wal Thornhill: The Long Path to Understanding Gravity | EU2015**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXY8GyTkqbM) — *the featured anchor.* A one-hour EU2015 conference lecture (Phoenix, 26 June 2015) in which Thornhill narrates his forty-year path to the dipole theory. ([alternate upload](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkWiBxWieQU)) - [**Thornhill's POV: Electric Gravity in an Electric Universe, Part 1**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcNL8waVNZ8) and [**Part 2**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnJDtSDWac8) — a posthumous narrated reading (Dec 2025) of the canonical 2008 essay; the clearest spoken statement of the model. - [**Wal Thornhill's Electric Dipole Gravity Model**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxoKnoUZnU) (channel: *See the Pattern*) — an independent, EU-sympathetic explainer that unpacks the mechanism step by step. ## How electric gravity carries the rest of the theory Electric gravity is not a side topic; it is the **load-bearing mechanism** under EU planetary catastrophism. If mass is charge-dependent, then: - **Planetary capture becomes possible.** Thornhill's EU Workshop 2014 lecture [**The Star 'Proto-Saturn'**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDO1WNiocOE) has a section titled "Is Gravity Electrical?" sitting right before "Proto-Saturn's Capture" — because a brown dwarf and its planets can only be captured and re-ordered by the Sun if their effective masses can shift during the encounter, which Newtonian gravity forbids. - **Orbits circularize quickly.** In "Newton's Electric Clockwork Solar System" planets act as charged bodies exchanging current with the Sun through their plasma tails; an intense discharge "can circularize and shrink the planet's orbit" — Thornhill's account of why Venus, in the EU model the youngest planet, now has the most circular orbit of all. The episode [**Proto-Saturn & Comet Venus**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrPv4xyJ_f4) develops this. - **Planetary scars follow.** The same charge-and-discharge framework underwrites the reading of Valles Marineris and the "battle-scarred" face of Mars as electrical, not aqueous or impact, features. So one idea — charge-dependent mass plus discharge — is meant to deliver capture, fast orbital change, and recent planetary scarring in a single stroke. The page on [proto-saturn](proto-saturn) is where that history is told. ## Thornhill against gravitational waves Because his model makes gravity near-instantaneous, Thornhill rejected the LIGO gravitational-wave detections outright. In **"Gravitational Waves"** (holoscience.com, 2016) he argued that the millisecond arrival-time difference between LIGO's two detectors proves the signal "cannot have anything to do with gravity," proposing instead an electromagnetic signal carried through a neutrino medium — "You cannot wave nothing!" The position is restated across [**An Examination of "Gravitational Waves"**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Hoax81rkI) (2016), [**Big Science and the Impossibility of Gravitational Waves**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2xEmFoc_0U) (2017, after the LIGO Nobel), and the posthumous [**Thornhill's POV: Gravitational Waves**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgGTzXu3EA8) (2024). ## Related pages ## Sources & further reading - Wal Thornhill, ["Electric Gravity in an ELECTRIC UNIVERSE"](https://www.holoscience.com/wp/electric-gravity-in-an-electric-universe/) (2008) — the primary text - Wal Thornhill, ["Newton's Electric Clockwork Solar System"](https://www.holoscience.com/wp/newtons-electric-clockwork-solar-system/) (2009) — variable G, capture, circularization - Wal Thornhill, ["Gravitational Waves"](https://www.holoscience.com/wp/gravitational-waves/) (2016) — his case against LIGO - Talk page for the anchor lecture: [The Long Path to Understanding Gravity | EU2015](https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2022/09/17/wal-thornhill-the-long-path-to-understanding-gravity-eu2015/) - Tom Van Flandern, "The speed of gravity — What the experiments say," *Physics Letters A* 250 (1998) — [readable reprint](https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/tom-van-flandern-the-speed-of-gravity-what-the-experiments-say/); [article archive](https://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/) - Ralph Sansbury, *Faster Than Light* (2012) — the subtron/electric-dipole model Thornhill builds on - Wallace Thornhill & David Talbott, *The Electric Universe* (2007) — book-length statement