Rosenfeld, Bergmann, Dirac and the Invention of Constrained Hamiltonian Dynamics
History and Philosophy of Physics
2016-11-15 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
In a paper appearing in Annalen der Physik in 1930 Leon Rosenfeld invented the first procedure for producing Hamiltonian constraints. He displayed and correctly distinguished the vanishing Hamiltonian generator of time evolution, and the vanishing generator of gauge transformations for general relativity with Dirac electron and electrodynamic field sources. Though he did not do so, had he chosen one of his tetrad fields to be normal to his spacetime foliation, he would have anticipated by almost thirty years the general relativisitic Hamiltonian first published by Paul Dirac.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.physics/0701299,
title = {Rosenfeld, Bergmann, Dirac and the Invention of Constrained Hamiltonian Dynamics},
author = {D. C. Salisbury},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0701299},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
5 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of the Eleventh Marcel Grossmann Meeting