The Debate Continues

In 1960, Fulton and Rohrlich [3] produced a simpler derivation of the electromagnetic fields due to an eternally uniformly accelerating charge. These authors consider a uniformly accelerating charge in a Minkowski spacetime with no gravitational effects (not even non-tidal ones) [3]. The main achievement of their paper is to obtain the EM fields proposed by Bondi and Gold in a simpler and more convincing way, without assuming any specific physical process. Bondi and Gold consider a process in which a positive and negative charge are simultaneously created, which may of course be interesting for other reasons. Fulton and Rohrlich achieve the same end by mathematics alone.

The main claim is that such a charge will radiate. They devote some time to the question of how energy can then be conserved, given the fact that the radiation reaction force as it is usually calculated is zero in this case, and in a last section they too address the question of whether radiation in uniformly accelerated motion contradicts the principle of equivalence.