A New Case for Direct Action

Abstract

An obstacle to the development of direct action version of electromagnetism was that in the end it failed to fulfill its initial promise of avoiding the problem of infinite Coulomb self-energy in the Maxwell theory of the classical point charge. This paper suggests a small but significant modification of the traditional direct action theory which overcomes that obstacle. Self-action is retained but the associated energy is rendered finite and equal to zero in the special case of null motion.

Presented at PIRT 2008; corrected typos