A Massless-Point-Charge Model for the Electron

"It is rather remarkable that the modern concept of electrodynamics is not quite 100 years old and yet still does not rest firmly upon uniformly accepted theoretical foundations. Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field is firmly ensconced in modern physics, to be sure, but the details of how charged particles are to be coupled to this field remain somewhat uncertain, despite the enormous advances in quantum electrodynamics over the past 45 years. Our theories remain mathematically ill-posed and mired in conceptual ambiguities which quantum mechanics has only moved to another arena rather than resolve. Fundamentally, we still do not understand just what is a charged particle" (Grandy W.T. Jr. Relativistic quantum mechanics of leptons and fields. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht-London, 1991, p.367). As a partial answer to the preceeding quote, this paper presents a new model for the electron that combines the seminal work of Puthoff with the theory of the Planck vacuum (PV), the basic idea for the model following from Puthoff with the PV theory adding some important details.