  We study the electromagnetic fields of an arbitrarily moving charged particle
and the radiation reaction on the charged particle using a novel approach. We
first show that the fields of an arbitrarily moving charged particle in an
inertial frame can be related in a simple manner to the fields of a uniformly
accelerated charged particle in its rest frame. Since the latter field is
static and easily obtainable, it is possible to derive the fields of an
arbitrarily moving charged particle by a coordinate transformation. More
importantly, this formalism allows us to calculate the self-force on a charged
particle in a remarkably simple manner. We show that the original expression
for this force, obtained by Dirac, can be rederived with much less computation
and in an intuitively simple manner using our formalism.
