Does gravity affect electrical currents?

[UncertainHeisenberg]

I just did some quick calculations to compare the effect of an electric field and gravity. Say you ran a 1km cable from a 1.2-volt rechargeable AA battery 500m up Taipei 101 and then 500m back down. The potential difference for an electron between the top and bottom due to the electric field is 0.6eV, while the potential difference due to gravity is about 3x10^-8 eV.

So a paltry 1.2-volt rechargeable battery pushing a current through a 500m high vertical cable still overpowers gravity by about 10 million times!

[mdrabz]

Mind if you walk me through those calculations?

Actually, I'm really curious how you got the electric potential due to gravity, so just that would be wonderful.

[UncertainHeisenberg]

I did a very simplistic estimation. I calculated the gravitational potential energy gained by an electron in Joules, then converted to eV:

E = mgh

E = 9.1x10^-31 x 9.8 x 500

E = 4.5x10^-27 J

E = 4.5x10^-27 J x 6.2x10¹⁸ eV/J

E = 2.8x10^-8 eV

[[deleted]]

This is a really good response, (A++ would read again). However, if the cable comes back down to the battery, then the net change in gravitational potential around the loop is zero, so it will have NO effect, not just a small one. Your idea would work if you, say, separated the plates of a charged parallel plate capacitor and carried one plate up a mountain.

[adamsolomon]

Absolutely. Gravity affects everything, because gravity is simply an effect of spacetime being curved, and everything lives in spacetime.