Biefeld-Brown Effect Explained? Tom Valone, Electrogravitics, and Jefimenko’s Causal Fields

January 26, 2026

In the breakthrough-propulsion world, high voltage gets all the glamour—big capacitors, big arcs, big claims. Tom Valone’s most interesting move is almost the opposite: the action is argued to live in the edge, in the transient—because a usually-ignored part of Oleg Jefimenko’s source-based (“causal”) electric-field description only exists while current is changing. That makes rise time and the rate at which current changes less like an academic detail and more like the knob that serious experimentalists eventually end up turning.

EM Causality and the Biefeld-Brown Effect

Electromagnetic induction is one of those topics where a useful classroom story can harden into superstition. The superstition goes like this: a changing magnetic field causes an electric field, and a changing electric field causes a magnetic field, and the loop explains itself. Maxwell’s equations relate these quantities, but a clean cause–effect narrative is slippery unless fields are explicitly tied back to sources and propagation.

Valone’s arc leans on Jefimenko’s insistence that this isn’t nitpicking. In Valone’s phrasing, the familiar “changing magnetic field causes electric field” story is treated as an incomplete causal picture; the emphasis shifts toward a source-first description in which charges and currents generate fields that propagate outward in time. Induction becomes less a mystical reciprocity between fields and more a question of what the sources are doing, where, and how quickly.

“This is the essence of electromagnetic induction, as Maxwell intended, which is measured by, not caused by, a changing magnetic field.” —Oleg Jefimenko

That shift matters because it changes what gets treated as primary. Instead of telling a “field-causes-field” story, the emphasis moves to source questions: what changed in charges and currents, how fast, and where? The story becomes one of geometry, timing, and gradients—conditions that can be measured, logged, and re-created.

This is also where the “entry-level” framing of the Biefeld-Brown effect fits naturally. The effect is compelling because it is accessible and dramatic, but it is also loaded with confounds. The path from spectacle to science is the move from kilovolts and plate geometry toward waveform capture, environmental controls, and causal bookkeeping—because many “better results” narratives are really narratives about uncontrolled transients and uncontrolled coupling.

The Third Term: Valone’s electrokinetic reading of Jefimenko

Valone’s pivot is concrete: a three-part description of the electric field that he presents as Jefimenko’s “causal” formulation. The rhetorical punch is that the third part is easy to ignore in casual induction talk—yet it becomes central in Valone’s interpretation of electrogravitic reports.

In Valone’s summary, an “electrokinetic” contribution is described as the third piece of a classical, source-based solution for the electric field, and the overall form is treated as “causal” because it links the field back to charge and current—the sources that induce it. This matters because the electrokinetic piece is framed as current-aligned and transient-gated rather than static and ever-present.

Two properties are emphasized as propulsion-adjacent: this electrokinetic contribution is directed along the direction of the current, and it exists only as long as the current is changing in time. If that temporal gate is real, then “electrogravitic thrust” stops sounding like a steady push from high voltage and starts sounding like a switching phenomenon—something that appears at turn-on, turn-off, or during rapid transitions.

That one conceptual move explains why experienced researchers drift away from purely electrostatic language. Entry-level discussions orbit kilovolts and plate geometry; the Jefimenko/Valone framing orbits timing, derivatives, and waveform logging—because the effect (if present) is asserted to live in the transient, not the plateau.

The impulse worldview: vector potential, switching, and where the force “lives”

Once the electrokinetic contribution is treated as transient-only, the natural mental model becomes impulse rather than steady thrust. Valone connects this to the magnetic vector potential, treating the relevant physics as something that can manifest as an impulse at the moment a current is switched on—language he attributes to Jefimenko’s interpretation.

That framing predicts when any force signature should appear: clustered around the moments when the system is being driven through sharp current change. It also predicts what “success” would look like experimentally: not a constant force under steady direct-current conditions, but repeatable correlations between force readout and edge events—rise times, turn-on spikes, and asymmetries between the “ramping up” and “ramping down” portions of the drive.

“This field can exist anywhere in space and can manifest itself as a pure force by its action on free electric charges.” —Oleg Jefimenko

Even read cautiously, the engineering implication is clear: if the hypothesis is right, the problem is largely about how sharply a circuit can be driven, not how high a steady voltage can be held. This is why pulse-power culture shows up so reliably in electrogravitics discussions: not because pulsing is mystical, but because pulsing is how engineering buys controllable edges.

The impulse worldview also forces momentum bookkeeping to become part of the narrative instead of an afterthought. Valone openly acknowledges the conceptual discomfort of unbalanced-force claims, treating them as an unresolved accounting problem rather than a solved victory. That restraint is valuable: it keeps the story honest while still explaining why a source-based, transient-driven framing can feel like a graduate-level upgrade within the community.

The engineering knob: rise time and the rate of current change

With the impulse framing in place, Valone states the core design lever bluntly: the faster the current changes, the larger the electrokinetic contribution is expected to be, and therefore pulsed high-voltage inputs are favored. The emphasis is not “voltage wins,” but “voltage helps buy fast current transients.”

“An important consequence is that the faster the rates of change of current, the larger will be the electrokinetic force. Therefore, high voltage pulsed inputs are favored.” — Tom Valone

This reframes what the common bench narrative often misses. High voltage can produce dramatic visuals and strong electrostatic forces, but Valone’s framing makes the time dependence the hero: measurable force from a conductor requires that current changes very fast. In other words: rise time becomes the amplifier.

The same logic is used to reinterpret historical electrogravitics. Valone notes that dielectric structures are often invoked for greater efficacy and charge density, and he argues that the electrokinetic force can have counterintuitive directionality depending on sign conventions—an attractive feature for experimentalists because it offers a polarity-and-sign coherence check rather than a purely qualitative “it moved.”

Most importantly, it sets up a falsifiable scaling expectation: if the effect is tied to how fast current changes, then “better results” should track sharper edges and faster transitions more reliably than they track steady voltage alone. The hypothesis stops being a vibe and becomes a curve: edge speed versus measured force.

Waveform engineering: why sawtooths (and flybacks) keep showing up

At this point the story stops being about a single equation and becomes about signal design. Valone makes the cancellation problem explicit: very fast current changes—surges and discharges—should produce the most dynamic effect because the current changes extremely quickly, but the declining portion of the surge (when current is falling) should create an opposing force until the current reverses. That is the mechanism’s built-in trap: naïve pulses can self-cancel.

“Very fast changes in current has to produce the most dynamic electrokinetic force, since dI/dt will be very large. Creative waveshaping seems to be the answer to this obvious dilemma.” —Tom Valone

Valone’s response is direct: creative waveshaping is treated as the answer, precisely because the mechanism (as proposed) is driven by edges and naturally invites cancellation. He points to a specific “improved” waveform style associated with Schlicher: a rectified current surge with a very steep leading edge and a slowly declining trailing edge—described as desirable for enhancing the electrokinetic contribution.

The idea is pushed further: if the waveform is extended into a negative-current phase in a way that reinforces the electrokinetic contribution, the cycle can be biased toward a unidirectional net contribution for much of its period. Whether or not the thrust claim holds up, the structure of the argument is unmistakable: the waveform becomes the technology, because the claimed signal lives on the edge.

This is where the recurring folklore around television flyback transformers becomes narratively meaningful. Flybacks naturally generate highly asymmetric, sawtooth-like waveforms with sharp transitions; many experimenters report better results with that style of drive than with a smooth sine. In the Valone/Jefimenko framing, that preference has a clean interpretation: waveforms that concentrate energy into sharp edges and asymmetry are exactly the waveforms that maximize rapid current change while reducing self-cancellation.

Why Valone thinks the “edge” can predict direction (and why that matters)

Valone goes beyond “edges matter” and argues that the electrokinetic framework can be directionally informative. For parallel-plate capacitor impulse probes, the electrokinetic picture is presented as a working model that can predict the nature and direction of force during charging and discharging phases.

The hedging is important. Valone repeatedly notes that detailed circuit information is required to compute theoretical forces and compare with experiment. The argument is conditional: the model can only be tested if the inputs are fully characterized—waveforms, impedances, geometry, materials, and timing. Without those, a reported deflection is merely a reported deflection.

He also stresses an engineering truth that is easy to miss: even when geometries are held constant, outcomes can be dominated by signal details, meaning a detailed analysis is needed for each specific circuit and signal to determine the outcome. This is another way of saying that “voltage only” stories are structurally incomplete.

Finally, the momentum concern remains the adult supervision of the whole conversation. A transient electromagnetic mechanism can be explored as a momentum-exchange problem in fields and structures, but the bar remains high: anything that looks like a net force must survive not only engineering controls, but also a credible accounting of where the reaction momentum resides.

Voltage-slew and the proportional-rise constraint

Across Valone’s documents, the headline lever is the rate at which current changes. The rate at which voltage changes is not typically treated as the star, because the mechanism is described in terms of current change and current-density change.

And yet the practical constraint shows up in a familiar experimental form: raising voltage while letting current fall can reduce performance, which is interpreted as evidence that voltage rise and current rise must remain proportional to maintain the effect. That observation is not a derivation, but it is the kind of shop-floor law that aligns with the transient worldview: in many pulse-power contexts, voltage slew and current slew are entangled, and a system that inflates peak voltage while flattening the transient current profile may look impressive while moving away from the hypothesized driver.

That proportional-rise idea also harmonizes with the waveform section’s cancellation logic. If the effect is edge-driven and sensitive to cancellation, then proportional changes that preserve edge structure should matter more than changes that merely inflate the plateau. The story becomes less about “more volts” and more about preserving and shaping the edge.

The replication ladder: what “professional-grade” evidence looks like

Valone’s strongest methodological note is also the simplest: detailed circuit and signal information is required to compute theoretical forces and compare with experiment. That single demand, if taken seriously, forces a replication culture: full waveform capture at the device terminals, impedance characterization, geometry disclosure, material properties, and careful separation of electrical transients from mechanical coupling.

The waveform dependence is not a side detail; it is the core experimental opportunity. If force signatures are claimed to ride on edges, then the test program should deliberately vary rise time, leading-edge and trailing-edge asymmetry, duty cycle, and waveform symmetry—then check whether the force readout tracks those manipulations predictably.

The same logic supplies strong null tests. Symmetric waveforms designed to maximize cancellation should collapse any net impulse if the mechanism is purely edge-driven; waveforms engineered for asymmetry should produce stronger directional signatures if the hypothesis is correct. The cancellation problem is not an inconvenience—it is a built-in tool for discrimination.

A disciplined close becomes possible without hype. If every thrust-looking signal vanishes under better waveform logging and controls, the work still upgrades the field by replacing spectacle with testable scaling laws. If a signal survives and tracks waveform manipulations in the way the electrokinetic framework predicts, it earns the right to be treated as a real electromagnetic-momentum problem rather than an anecdote. That is the real historical arc: Biefeld-Brown as the on-ramp, and Jefimenko-style EM causality as the filter that separates curiosity from a serious experimental program.