Newton's Third Law in the Framework of Special Relativity for Charged Bodies Part 3: Time Dependent Engines

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of relativistic engines based on electromagnetic retardation effects, demonstrating that Newton's third law cannot strictly hold in distributed charged systems, leading to momentum and energy transfer.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing time-dependent charged systems as relativistic engines, relaxing the assumption of macroscopic natural bodies.

Findings

Relativistic electromagnetic retardation causes force imbalances in charged systems.

Distributed charged systems can acquire momentum and energy over finite force application periods.

The study generalizes the behavior of electric relativistic engines to time-dependent scenarios.

Abstract

The Lorentz symmetry group entails physical equations whose solutions are retarded. This leads to the concept of a relativistic engine resulting from retardation of electromagnetic fields. We have shown that Newton'n third law cannot strictly hold in a distributed system, where the different parts are at a finite distance from each other and thus force imbalance is created at the system's center of mass. As the system is affected by a total force for a finite period, mechanical momentum and energy are acquired by the system. In previous works we relied on the fact that the bodies were macroscopically natural. Lately we relaxed this assumption and studied charged bodies, thus analyzing the consequences on a possible electric relativistic engine. On the first paper on this subject we investigated this phenomena in general but gave an example of a system only at the stage of reaching a stationary state, a second paper was devoted to the same but on the atomic scale, here we shall analyze the charge relativistic engine in a general time dependent setting.