Single-Particle Electrodynamics - Assassination Science

mately chosen, both for simplicity, and to ensure a standard result that could
be run on any machine—the author already having been burnt previously
by the implementation-dependencies of C++, which has not, unfortunately,
been standardised as yet.
Of course, the output of computer programs must always be eyed suspiciously,
being only as reliable as the programmer’s concentration level at the
most fatigued point of his work. It is for this reason that the fully checked,
manually-obtained results for the electric charge field contributions to the
radiation reaction terms—computed from beginning to end—were crucial,
for the purpose of debugging the program at each stage of its development.
The computations up to n of the final-order-in-ε results were also important,
in order to verify that the algorithms were correctly handling the extra order
of complexity involved. Once the integrity of the system had been exhaustively
verified, the remaining computations were performing exclusively by
computer—being, of course, too lengthy to continue further on paper.
At a late stage, it was recognised that the definition of the relativistically
rigid body originally used by the author did not correctly handle the subtle
Thomas precession of the constituents, as the body made the transition to
a finite velocity and acceleration (see Section 3.3). This rendered almost
all of the author’s manually-computed results erroneous, in the lower orders.
Fortunately, the program radreact was completed before this oversight was
noted, and it was quite a minor task adding the extra precession expression
to the program.
When the program was then run anew, it was found that, indeed, practically
all expressions which contained sufficient orders in τ or ε (specifically,
those for which terms involving both ˙v and ¨v were present) were changed
by the redefinition of the rigid body. However,—and most surprisingly,—the
final radiation reaction equations of motion were not changed at all, despite
the fact that even the penultimate equations had significant modifications.
Although the deep physical meaning behind such an “invariance” of the re-
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