The generation of gravitational waves. II - The postlinear formalism revisited

Two different versions of the Green's function for the scalar wave equation in weakly curved spacetime (one due to DeWitt and DeWitt, the other to Thorne and Kovacs) are compared and contrasted; and their mathematical equivalence is demonstrated. Then the DeWitt-DeWitt Green's function is used to construct several alternative versions of the Thorne-Kovacs postlinear formalism for gravitational-wave generation. Finally it is shown that, in calculations of gravitational bremsstrahlung radiation, some of our versions of the postlinear formalism allow one to treat the interacting bodies as point masses, while others do not.