Since our goal here is to produce an understanding of the science of Dr. Brown, may I suggest that you place gravity on the TTB triangle along with magnetism and electricity at the other apexes. In this way, we may also be able do see how each is a cause and effect on the others.
The thing about including gravity is that in all of mainstream science as we know it, the important thing to know about gravity is that it *doesn't* include neatly into electromagnetism, and you won't find that GEM triangle in a textbook, because the forces that we do know do NOT have a neat three-way symmetry (because gravity doesn't quantize, for example). By all the standards of mainstream science, that TTB triangle is simply wrong.
I'd like TTB to be right and for all of mainstream physics to be so radically wrong, and I'm open to the possibility, but because it's such a huge and contested claim, we can't simply claim that he was correct without showing the world some numbers. If you just have an intuitive feeling that gravity MUST go together with electromagnetism - well, so did Einstein, and he spent forty years trying to prove it, and failed. So it's a Very Hard Problem indeed.
If we're trying to describe the current state of *mainstream* science in this thread, it would be better to stick to what the best current theories (namely, General Relativity and Quantum Electrodynamics) say about gravity and electromagnetism, and then if we think we understand how TTB was different, to show where we think he diverged from both of those.
As a brief overview, here's what I understand as the current state of physics:
* Newtonian Mechanics (Classical Mechanics), including Newtonian Gravity, describes how forces (acceleration times mass) affect solid objects. Objects have mass, mass has inertia (resistance to acceleration) and all motion in a straight line is relative (you can't tell how fast you're moving, only the difference between speeds), and you simply add speeds together. (Actually 'velocity' rather than 'speed' since velocity is a vector, an arrow pointing in a direction.)
* Newtonian Gravity is the only force in Newtonian it deals with that works over a distance. It's considered accurate at low speeds and low gravity fields. It's not accurate at describing the planet Mercury which is very fast and close to the Sun, nor is it accurate enough for the Global Positioning System satellites (though some people dispute this) or for the motion of stars and galaxies.
* Classical Electrodynamics (Maxwell's Equations) came around in the mid 1800s, it's a very simple set of equations describing how electricity and magnetism affect each other and create light and radio waves (electromagnetic radiation). It's what most people think about when they think 'electromagnetism'. It's generally good enough for electrical and radio work at room sizes down to some transistors, but not at all when you get down to inside a silicon chip and modern cellphone radios.
The tricky thing about Classical Electrodynamics and Classical Mechanics is that they don't work well together. In Newton, speeds are relative - but in Maxwell, speeds are absolute. This started to break down when Michelson and Morley didn't find evidence of the 'ether' (the mysterious invisible substance which light and radio wave were assumed to travel through, which had to be both lighter than the lightest gas and harder than steel). There's controversy over what Michelson and Morley actually found, but the mainstream consensus is that they found something shocking: that the round-trip speed of light in every direction is the same and is not affected by Earth's speed in space. If it were a wave like sound, we'd expect light to be compressed in one direction and stretched in another, like the Doppler Effect, but it isn't. This is very weird.
* Special Relativity was introduced by Einstein in 1905 to tie Newton and Maxwell together. To keep Newton's idea of relative speeds and make Maxwell's equations also relative, he did nasty things to space and time, so that time would literally stretch and space shrink as objects travelled at the relative speed of light. This solved the equations and made electromagnetism more closely tied together, but was very controversial at the time. Now it's considered such settled science that if you question Einstein, eyes instantly roll and you are ejected from the party as a crank. But, well, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but the maths works, so okay. SR introduces the very annoying rule (if you want to travel in space) that nothing can ever go faster than the speed of light. So it would take a couple of years minimum to get to the nearest star and thousands to millions of years to get anywhere interesting, and it would still take more energy than the Sun to do it. So SR is one reason why many scientists don't believe in UFOs - 'how could they get here? Einstein says they can't.'
* General Relativity was introduced by Einstein in 1915 to add gravity back into his new stretchy-space-time universe of Special Relativity, because Newtonian Gravity didn't fit any longer. It took him ten years but he made it work by redefining gravity from a 'force' to 'curvature of space-time'. The maths of this is very subtle and clever. Space and time stretch like silly putty, gravity can slow time, energy and speed can cause gravity. The trick is to find ways that space and time can distort which are plausible (caused by the kind of matter and energy that we know of). These are called 'exact solutions' and they are still kind of rare, and most seem to need something like the power of a star to do anything interesting. GR predicts light bending around stars, the orbit of Mercury, and clocks slowing in orbit of the GPS satellites. Townsend Brown seemed to sponsor research in the 1950s which put General Relativity back on the scientific table.
* Unified Field Theory was an extension of General Relativity to include electromagnetism, which Einstein and many others worked on from 1915 to the 1950s. Many approaches were tried, none of them ever apparently quite worked. This quest spun off into many different directions since then - mainly String Theory and Quantum Gravity, both of which are really families of theories, have really really really hard maths, and haven't produced anything practical yet. Except String Theory people hate Quantum Gravity people, and vice versa. It got to the name-calling and hair-pulling stage this decade with respected physicists publishing books like 'Not Even Wrong' saying that String Theory is all a bunch of baloney.
* Quantum Mechanics came about in the 1920s-30s because of what strange things radioactive atoms, as well as light, were doing. The equations only made sense when you threw out the idea of light and electrons moving smoothly and made them change state abruptly in little chunks called 'quanta'. This made the maths of atoms very very complicated but it was enough for people to build atom bombs with slide rules in the 1940s.
* Quantum Electrodynamics was the part of Quantum Mechanics which revised Einstein's Special Relativity's revision of Classical Electrodynamics (whew!) It's pretty darn complicated, and there's no way to fit gravity into it because it's incompatible with General Relativity. But it's very well tested and is used in making silicon chips, and is tested every day in particle accelerators, so it's very unlikely that it's wrong as far as it goes. But Einstein never liked it and thought it was just an approximation to a better theory which he never found.
* Electroweak Theory and Quantum Chromodynamics describe all the new particles which particle accelerators found since the 1950s (the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force). I don't know much about these except that the weak force was obviously involved in nuclear fission so it must have been understood in some form in the 1940s, but presumably not as part of QED.
Right! So... when you want to talk about Electromagnetism.... and Gravity... which theory?
It's probably simpler to talk about the Maxwell Equations - which is fine - but remember that, in some modern applications like silicon chips, they are actually very very wrong.
If you're doing things which don't involve particles or galaxies, GR and QED are 'good enough' approximations, but are still far too difficult for scientists to use in daily life, so they use approximations, which they know to be wrong but hope are wrong in the right ways to get 'good enough' answers fast. Most of physics now seems to be about learning how to pick the right approximation in the right situation because you'll never be able to get enough computer time to run the actual 'correct' numbers.
And even GR and QED are known to be almost certainly wrong because they don't work together, but the various replacement String Theory or Quantum Gravity theories haven't proved themselves yet.
The two things that are giving astronomers pause at the moment are breakdowns of GR: 'dark matter' (galaxies apparently orbit closer than GR predicts from the number of visible stars) and 'dark energy' (the universe is apparently expanding faster than GR predicts, so there may be an 'antigravitational force'). Then there's the 'Pioneer Anomaly', where the Pioneer space probe is apparently slowing down at the wrong rate. Lots of people claim their pet theory solves these problems, but they can't all be right. And GR doesn't really affect us much here on Earth, except for the GPS satellites.
On the small scale, there are lots of people playing with quantum computers, quantum dots, quantum teleportation, so QED is getting a hammering, and the Large Hadron Collider will get right into the other forces.
The claim that you can build a device in a garage which violates GR or QED would be simply unbelievable to most physicists, because both are so apparently well-tested. But if we think we've got one and can prove it - that would be interesting.
So - are we trying to reconstruct a whole new physics of 'electrogravity' on top of... what? Maxwell? Newton? Maxwell with Special Relativity? SR+GR? Or the nasty quantum stuff?
