The generation of gravitational waves. 2: The post-linear 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. The DeWitt-DeWitt Green's function is used to construct several alternative versions of the Thorne-Kovacs post-linear formalism for gravitational-wave generation. Finally it is shown that, in calculations of gravitational bremsstrahlung radiation, some of our versions of the post-linear formalism allow one to treat the interacting bodies as point masses, while others do not.