Single-Particle Electrodynamics - Assassination Science

workers.
In 1969, Cohn [53] unfortunately attacked the problem anew, unaware of
the previous work in the area. (Somewhat surprisingly, the paper is published
in the same journal that carried Ellis’s final results just three years
earlier.) The reason that Cohn’s paper is unfortunate—rather than simply
another instance of blissful ignorance—is that, unlike the previous participants
in the saga, he got the analysis wrong. This was quickly pointed out
by Kolsrud [125] in that same journal.
Fortunately, Cohn did not retreat from the subject; six years later, he and
his Ph.D. student Wiebe attacked this problem again [54], making due note
of Cohn’s earlier mistakes; and, this time, the correct results were obtained.
Cohn and Wiebe based their results on the four-potential expression obtained
by Kolsrud and Leer [124]; their manifestly-covariant field expressions are, in
the opinion of the author, the easiest to come to grips with, from the viewpoint
of modern notation and concepts, out of the various treatments listed
above (although, mathematically speaking, they are all ultimately equivalent).
As far as the author can ascertain, the field then again lay essentially dormant
for another seventeen years, until the author, as blissfully unaware of
his predecessors as they were of their predecessors, attacked the same problem
again, from first principles. The motivation for this was that, following
the successful derivation of the dipole equations of motion of Chapter 4, the
author wished to use the retarded fields, together with the dipole equations
of motion, to obtain the radiation reaction equations of motion for particles
with dipole moments. Not being, at the time, able to find the retarded fields
listed anywhere in the literature (the works cited in this section essentially
being a set of measure zero, compared to the total volume of physics literature
of the past century), the author proceeded to derive the desired results
from scratch.
The results found by the author are presented in the following sections
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