| 1 | Dirac’s original expression actually involved
the rate of change of the acceleration vector on the right-hand
side. The resulting equation gives rise to the well-known problem
of runaway solutions. To avoid such unphysical behaviour I have
submitted Dirac’s equation to a reduction-of-order procedure
whereby is
replaced with . This procedure is explained and justified, for
example, in [47 , 26 ]. |
|
| 2 | His analysis was restricted to a
minimally-coupled scalar field, so that in his expressions. The extension to an
arbitrary coupling constant was carried out by myself for this
review. |
|
| 3 | Note that I use symbols for the frame indices.
This is to distinguish them from another set of frame indices that
will appear below. The frame indices introduced here run from 0 to
3; those to be introduced later will run from 1 to 3. |