I'm developing a story set 4-5 centuries after the fall of a high-tech civilization. The fall of said civilization is indirectly related to a loss of electricity. i.e. in the chaos of their technology no longer working like it should, they devolved into a scavengerpunk world. I'm toying with the idea of the loss of electricity being caused by some form of energy field disrupting the electromagnetic force and this field would do so by manipulating the electric constant epsilon naught.
Is this workable? I.e. can the field cause enough disruption to electrical devices without causing life to not exist? And if so, what other side effects on the environment would occur? E.g. would a campfire that would normally have an orange flame, now have a red flame because of a change in the atomic energy level?
A few specifications:
I don't need the field to turn the em force completely off, just disrupt tech enough so that it doesn't work
the field would be non-uniform. i.e. concentrated on one spot of the planet, radiating outward and subsiding so that a spot on the opposite side of the planet would still be able to use electricity.
the field would also be self-maintaining through the centuries, such that the resulting society on the planet wouldn't have been able to remake any electrical devices after the fall.
All the research I've done on this site and others address what would happen if the EM force was turned off completely, or what would happen if the fundamental forces were a few percent different and how that would affect the ability of stars or carbon atoms to form.
A few other articles suggested that an easier way to go no electricity would be EMP, grey goo, societal restrictions, mineral scarcity, or even simply say magic did it. one of the more interesting ones I saw was bacteria suddenly getting a taste for copper. And I may end up going with one of those instead of the electric constant way if it doesn't work.
But before I go that way, I would appreciate some feedback on the feasibility of an energy field disrupting the electric constant.
Edit
Okay. I didn't think it was possible to modify the electric constant enough to get rid of electricity and still have intelligent life, but I wanted to ask anyway. I'm probably going to go with a modified version of the grey goo method mentioned in What kind of event could stop electricity?.
Essentially, the nanotech will absorb any electricity it finds from any active power sources. But when those power sources are turned off, or stop working from a lack of maintenance, the nanotech still wants to absorb electricity. So without any power sources feeding them, they would draw energy directly from the world. And this will have the effect of making any new power sources produce less electricity than they normally would because the nanotech pulling electricity from everywhere would simulate the effect of having a dielectric superimposed over a vacuum. i.e. more resistance to electric flow.
To quote this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permittivity
permittivity describes the amount of charge needed to generate one unit of electric flux in a particular medium.
A consequence of this would be that you could turn on a whole bunch of power sources, you wouldn't see any electricity output, but the permittivity would drop back down to normal because the nanotech is no longer drawing power from the world.
I also get that messing with the electric constant in this manner would affect lots of other constants, and I don't necessarily have an issue with this, as long as the effects are consistent. And I'm not really interested in changing the fine structure constant by as much as 4%, but to redirect my initial question, if the modification was small, such as 1/1000th of a percent, would there be any visible effects on the environment?
