Does Thomas Precession violate angular momentum conservation?
For anyone interested, I want to report I am still working trying to reconcile Thomas’s results in his 1927 paper with mine which are directly opposed. I think I may be getting close. He says his Eq. 6.72 may be obtained using the force (his 5.1) based on the Abraham spherical-shell-of-charge electron model. It is his 6.72 which differs from my equation of motion for the orbit (as above), and results in the conflict. I get mine from assuming the electron has an ordinary and constant-magnitude magnetic moment, and in the electron frame this creates a torque on the proton orbit. I mentioned above another way to do it by computing in the lab frame the torque on the orbit due to the anisotropy of the proton electric field, and that a moving magnetic dipole relativistically acquires an electric dipole moment, and hence there is a translational force on the orbiting electron in an anisotropic electric field, that on average is a torque on the orbit. If I understand what Thomas did, he did it
