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Variations on a Theme by Kepler

โœ Scribed by Victor W. Guillemin, Shlomo Sternberg


Publisher
American Mathematical Soc.
Year
2006
Tongue
English
Leaves
97
Series
Colloquium Publications volume 42
Category
Library

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โœฆ Synopsis


This book is based on the Colloquium Lectures presented by Shlomo Sternberg in 1990. The authors delve into the mysterious role that groups, especially Lie groups, play in revealing the laws of nature by focusing on the familiar example of Kepler motion: the motion of a planet under the attraction of the sun according to Kepler's laws. Newton realized that Kepler's second law--that equal areas are swept out in equal times--has to do with the fact that the force is directed radially to the sun. Kepler's second law is really the assertion of the conservation of angular momentum, reflecting the rotational symmetry of the system about the origin of the force. In today's language, we would say that the group $O(3)$ (the orthogonal group in three dimensions) is responsible for Kepler's second law. By the end of the nineteenth century, the inverse square law of attraction was seen to have $O(4)$ symmetry (where $O(4)$ acts on a portion of the six-dimensional phase space of the planet). Even larger groups have since been found to be involved in Kepler motion. In quantum mechanics, the example of Kepler motion manifests itself as the hydrogen atom. Exploring this circle of ideas, the first part of the book was written with the general mathematical reader in mind. The remainder of the book is aimed at specialists. It begins with a demonstration that the Kepler problem and the hydrogen atom exhibit $O(4)$ symmetry and that the form of this symmetry determines the inverse square law in classical mechanics and the spectrum of the hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics. The space of regularized elliptical motions of the Kepler problem (also known as the Kepler manifold) plays a central role in this book. The last portion of the book studies the various cosmological models in this same conformal class (and having varying isometry groups) from the viewpoint of projective geometry. The computation of the hydrogen spectrum provides an illustration of the principle that enlarging the phase space can simplify the equations of motion in the classical setting and aid in the quantization problem in the quantum setting. The authors provide a short summary of the homological quantization of constraints and a list of recent applications to many interesting finite-dimensional settings. The book closes with an outline of Kostant's theory, in which a unitary representation is associated to the minimal nilpotent orbit of $SO(4,4)$ and in which electromagnetism and gravitation are unified in a Kaluza-Klein-type theory in six dimensions.

โœฆ Table of Contents


Cover......Page 1
Title Page......Page 2
Copyright Page......Page 3
Contents......Page 4
Introduction......Page 6
1. Lie Groups and Lie brackets......Page 10
2. Poisson brackets......Page 15
3. Lenz and RQnge......Page 20
4. The inverse square law......Page 22
5. Kepler's laws......Page 24
6. Pauli......Page 26
7. Collisions......Page 30
8. Orbits and reductions......Page 38
9. SO(2, 4) and SU(2, 2)......Page 44
10. Reduction, enlargement, and quantizations......Page 48
11. The Kepler problem as reduction of geodesic flow......Page 50
12. Homological quantization of constraints......Page 55
13. Grassmannians......Page 62
14. Isotropic Grassmannians......Page 64
15. The conformal geometry of projective quadrics......Page 67
16. Null geodesics......Page 71
17. Horizons and the de Sitter space......Page 74
18. The Bondi-Gold-Hoyle universe......Page 77
19. The Einstein universe......Page 78
20. The anti-Einstein universe......Page 79
21. The Friedman-Robertson-Walker universes......Page 80
22. The Kostant universe......Page 81
A1. The Grunwald-van Hove theorem......Page 84
A2. Classical and quantum logic......Page 86
References......Page 92
Index......Page 96


๐Ÿ“œ SIMILAR VOLUMES


Variations on a Theme by Kepler
โœ Victor W. Guillemin and Shlomo Sternberg ๐Ÿ“‚ Library ๐Ÿ“… 1990 ๐Ÿ› American Mathematical Society ๐ŸŒ English

This book is based on the Colloquium Lectures presented by Shlomo Sternberg in 1990. The authors delve into the mysterious role that groups, especially Lie groups, play in revealing the laws of nature by focusing on the familiar example of Kepler motion: the motion of a planet under the attraction o

Variations on a Theme by Kepler
โœ Victor Guillemin; Shlomo Sternberg; American Mathematical Society ๐Ÿ“‚ Library ๐Ÿ“… 2006 ๐Ÿ› American Mathematical Society ๐ŸŒ English

This book is based on the Colloquium Lectures presented by Shlomo Sternberg in 1990. The authors delve into the mysterious role that groups, especially Lie groups, play in revealing the laws of nature by focusing on the familiar example of Kepler motion: the motion of a planet under the attraction o

Variations on a Theme by Kepler (Colloqu
โœ Victor Guillemin, Shlomo Sternberg ๐Ÿ“‚ Library ๐Ÿ“… 1990 ๐Ÿ› American Mathematical Society ๐ŸŒ English

This book is based on the Colloquium Lectures presented by Shlomo Sternberg in 1990. The authors delve into the mysterious role that groups, especially Lie groups, play in revealing the laws of nature by focusing on the familiar example of Kepler motion: the motion of a planet under the attraction o

Variations on a Theme by Kepler (Colloqu
โœ Victor W. Guillemin and Shlomo Sternberg ๐Ÿ“‚ Library ๐Ÿ“… 2006 ๐Ÿ› American Mathematical Society ๐ŸŒ English

This book is based on the Colloquium Lectures presented by Shlomo Sternberg in 1990. The authors delve into the mysterious role that groups, especially Lie groups, play in revealing the laws of nature by focusing on the familiar example of Kepler motion: the motion of a planet under the attraction o