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 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.

5 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of the Eleventh Marcel Grossmann Meeting

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Revisiting observables in generally covariant theories in the light of gauge fixing methods
• Elimination of the spin supplementary condition in the effective field theory approach to the post-Newtonian approximation
• Relaxation of first-class constraints and the quantization of gauge theories: from "matter without matter" to the reappearance of time in quantum gravity
• A road map for Feynman's adventures in the land of gravitation
• Regarding the `Hole Argument' and the `Problem of Time'