Jefimenko received his
bachelor's degree at
Lewis and Clark College in 1952 and his
master's degree at the
University of Oregon in 1954. He received his
Ph.D. at the
University of Oregon in 1956. Jefimenko worked for the development of the theory of electromagnetic retardation and relativity. In 1956, he was awarded the
Sigma Xi Prize. In 1971 and 1973, he won awards in the
AAPT Apparatus Competition. Jefimenko constructed and operated electrostatic generators run by
atmospheric electricity. Jefimenko worked on the generalization of
Newton's gravitational theory to
time-dependent systems. In his opinion, there is no objective reason for abandoning Newton's
force-field gravitational theory (in favor of a
metric gravitational theory). He was trying to develop and expand Newton's theory, making it compatible with the
principle of causality and making it applicable to time-dependent gravitational interactions. Jefimenko's expansion, or generalization, is based on the existence of the second gravitational force field, the "
cogravitational, or
Heaviside's field". This might also be called a
gravimagnetic field. It represents a physical approach profoundly different from the time-space geometry approach of Einstein's
general theory of relativity.
Oliver Heaviside first predicted this field in the article
A Gravitational and Electromagnetic Analogy (1893). ==Electromagnetic analogy of gravitational and cogravitational fields==