Single-Particle Electrodynamics - Assassination Science

performed the electric charge radiation reaction calculations, fully relativistically,
and then again when he wrote the program radreact to compute
the dipole results, he did not correctly Thomas-precess the constituent’s position
r as seen in the lab frame, as now described in Chapter 3; rather, the
vector u(τ) was effectively fixed. This subtle error of philosophy was not
detected until the program was fully completed and debugged. When the
calculations were suitably repaired, it was found that the changes carried
through to three orders of terms in the trajectories of the constituents. This
had consequential changes on about a third of all terms appearing in Section
G.6! These changes carried right through (literally) ninety-nine pages of
expressions. Then, in the final equations only, all of these changes cancelled
out completely! The author was not prepared for such an outcome.
The author believes this phenomenon may be explained as follows. By
essentially “rotating” the body as it began to move, the trajectory of any
particular constituent was modified. But, taken as a whole, the relevant
properties of the body still seemed to act the same as they would have without
rotation, perhaps because as one constituent rotated out of position,
another came to fill its place. This clearly is not correct physically, but it
was probably correct mathematically by virtue of the other underlying assumptions
of the author based on the assumption that the body did remain
non-rotating. Regardless, the results magically returned to their original
form on the hundredth page.
That this behaviour casts a favourable outlook on the computer algebra
computations follows from the fact that, regardless of the exact reason why
the results were mathematically invariant, the fact that the computer algebra
program did in fact return us to the same answers, after ninety-nine pages
of differences, shows that it must be computing at least something robustly;
and from the relative simplicity of the results, one would suspect that this
something might well be physical reality. Of course, this is not to say that
there are not other completely different contributions to the equations of mo-
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