https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01769-8
Regular Article
How the vacuum rescues the Lorentz electron and imposes its Newton and geodesic motion, and the equivalence principle
Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1090 GL, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Received:
18
December
2024
Accepted:
24
June
2025
Published online:
7
July
2025
In 1901, Lorentz models depict the electron as a uniformly charged, non-spinning spherical shell in classical electrodynamics. This model suffers from Coulomb repulsion between the like charges and a discrepancy between the kinematic and electromagnetic mass, the “problem 4/3”. In 1905, Poincaré solves both issues by incorporating vacuum energy with its negative pressure. Recently we proposed that vacuum energy can flow and condense, and act as an essential player in the interiors of regular, charged black holes, and in dark matter physics. That approach solves the above problems for the Lorentz electron with any spherically symmetric charge distribution. The point-particle limit produces the standard point-particle Lagrangian. This implies Newton–Lorentz motion, geodesic motion and the equivalence principle.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
