A simpler way to calculate how particles drag on themselves

When a charged or massive particle accelerates, it radiates energy and that radiation pushes back on the particle — the self-force problem. The standard approach uses manifestly covariant equations that are notoriously hard to turn into working simulations. By instead fixing a small but finite grid scale and working in the plain lab frame, the authors derive much simpler equations that agree exactly with known analytic solutions in 1D and can be extended straightforwardly to electrodynamics and general relativity.