English

From physical principles to classical Hamiltonian mechanics

Classical Physics 2014-10-02 v2

Abstract

We derive the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics directly, without reference to Lagrangian mechanics. We start from the definition of states in terms of labels used to identify them, and show how, under a deterministic and reversible process, the conservation of the cardinality of the labels leads to Hamilton's equations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.4717,
  title  = {From physical principles to classical Hamiltonian mechanics},
  author = {Gabriele Carcassi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.4717},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

5 pages; reworked definitions in section 2

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:06:44.109Z