H1 - Einstein Theories: Historical Perspective |
Speaker_ |
Salisbury, Donald |
Talk _ |
Rosenfeld, Bergmann, Dirac and the invention of constrained Hamiltonian dynamics |
Abstract _ |
In a paper appearing in Annalen der Physik in 1930 Leon Rosenfeld invented the first iterative 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 written down by Paul Dirac. Peter Bergmann and his coworkers, in addition to Dirac, independently invented and further elaborated constrained Hamiltonian dynamical formalisms in the late 1940’s and 1950’s. It is unclear what if any effect Rosenfeld’s pioneering work had on the full development of the theory that now underlies all canonical approaches to modern gauge theories. |