Special Relativity in the proper time of the source

Tepper Gill

In this talk, I report on a new implementation of the first two explicit postulates of special relativity in which the coordinate, geometric (or proper time) of the observer is replaced by the proper time of the source. This approach does not require self-interaction, and radiation appears directly as dissipation in the proper time version of Maxwell’s equations. (These equations are mathematically but not physically equivalent to the conventional ones, and shows explicitly that the second postulate is a convention imposed by the mathematical formulation, which is not required by physics.) A number of natural and physically interesting conclusions follow from this approach. Among others, we conclude that the classical self-energy divergency is not intrinsic to the physics, radiation has mass, only retarded solutions are admissible, and that Ritz was not completely wrong. (Recall that Ritz argued that the speed of light should depend on the motion of the source.)