Is the Total Charge in the Universe Really Zero?

[rbj]

I remember reading that the total charge in the universe is zero. However I can't remember where, or how they justified the statement.

everything measured has a tolerance of error, so "zero" might mean ridiculously small.

what this means is that the attractive gravitational force (or pseudo-force but let's view gravitation in a Newtonian manner, for simplicity) between two protons alone in free space is something like 10^-39 times the repulsive electrostatic force.

it's because of, in the scale of things that we notice, that the force of gravity is ostensibly far, far weaker than the electrostatic force. during the creation of stars, solar systems, and planets, if these globs of matter that were swirling around and trying to stick to each other (due to gravity) were all ever-so-slightly charged, they would repel instead of subtract. so all of these globs of matter better be electrically neutral, at least missing (or having an excess of) no more than one electron per, i dunno, something like 10³⁹ atoms, otherwize the weak gravity would have not been able to pull that matter together to form planets and stars.

Total charge is a "conserved quantity" in physics though, so the universe should have the same charge as it started with.

i thought that maybe the theory is that as matter was created out of the super high energy stuff that came out of the Big Bang, that perhaps all of the protons or positrons were each created with a corresponding electron in the process. but i don't know that, either.