Just learned by searching under my name and the word "physics" that my master's thesis is available for viewing online now. That's good news for modern man! ("Download PDF" will just open the PDF in a new window, not actually download it to your computer.) It has a few problems, conceptual and otherwise, and is mainly historical, like the current Boltzmann-Planck-Einstein wave-versus-particle blog posts of mine, but I'm still working on some of the ideas in it. Send me an email with your comments if you have any (see my profile).
26 Oct 2025: After finding my thesis online, I was going to contact Victor Michalk, my thesis advisor. It's been about 20 years since I exchanged emails with him. I looked for his email address on the Texas State University physics department website, but didn't find it. When I did a general search, I found his obituary from last year at about this time. Thanks for your good teaching from the pretty bad, but commonly used, Herbert Goldstein graduate text in mechanics, Professor Michalk! And for your guidance on my thesis.
19 August 2026, a few corrections to the thesis:
1. A slight comma misplacement in the "trial by fire," quote on the acknowledgements page (the comma should come after the parentheses). And in that same sentence I say I learned that I like teaching physics, but I have to admit, liking it didn't last long, although I still did it occasionally when I needed the money.
2. On page 45 I say: "In common with other references consulted for this thesis, Feynman and Panofsky and Phillips do not explicitly say that the 'mass of unknown origin' can be considered to be responsible for the binding energy of the classical electron."
This sentence was a bit of a ruse on my part. The exact two words "binding energy" aren't used by Panofsky and Phillips, but they explicitly say that such a mass of unknown origin is responsible for making the charge system stable: "An additional mass, \(-U_0/3c^2\), whose origin is not electromagnetic, is needed to account for the observed mass, which obeys the relativistically correct equations. This extra mass (or energy) presumably represents the nonelectromagnetic binding which must be present to make the charge system of the electron stable; its need was pointed out by Poincaré."
3. On pages 48 and 49, the radiation damping equations for the electric dipole moment \(p(x,t)\) are functions of x and t, position and time, but my \(x=Acos\omega t\) simple harmonic approximation is just a function of time. So I overlooked the need to mention the electric dipole moment approximation that gets rid of the x-dependence of the equations, firstly, then I didn't show that the amplitude A in the "simple harmonic approximation" isn't just a constant, it's a function of the incoming electromagnetic wave's changing frequency \(\omega\) and the dipole oscillator's constant frequency \(\omega_0\), and of the damping constant itself.
The dipole approximation to my equation on page 49 means the incoming electromagnetic wave and the dipole oscillator itself are treated as time-dependent only, The characteristic damping equation modifying the simple harmonic oscillator of natural frequency \(\omega _{0}\) becomes \(\ddot{x} + \gamma \dot{x} + \omega_0^2 x = eE_0cos\omega t\), with the damping constant \(\gamma = \frac{2e^2 \omega_0^2}{3mc^3}\).
A trial solution is \(x(t)=Acos(\omega t + \phi)\), which works well as long as we have the right initial conditions. Try it and see what you get for the amplitude A. The usual trial solution is \(x(t)=Aexp(i\omega t)\), which gives what I originally had in mind for A when I realized The Corrections needed to be done:
$$A = \frac{eE_0}{m(\omega_0^2 - \omega^2 + i\gamma\omega)}$$
So you see the "simple harmonic approximation" isn't as simple(minded) as I made it appear in my thesis. Indeed, to give you (and me) more to study before I move on to the next post, here's something Francis Low says in his book Classical Field Theory (1997), at the beginning of the section on "Scattering by a Damped Harmonic Oscillator and Radiation Reaction," page 212: that the damping constant in this model of the light-matter interaction is something "that we will adjust to give overall energy conservation via the optical theorem."
