Classical dynamics on triangleland

This paper elaborates on relationalism about space and time as motivated by a minimalist ontology of the physical world: there are only matter points that are individuated by the distance relations among them, with these relations changing. We assess two strategies to combine this ontology with physics, using classical mechanics as example: the Humean strategy adopts the standard, non-relationalist physical theories as they stand and interprets their formal apparatus as the m...

This monograph describes a Riemannian geometric reduction approach to the three-body problem. The fundamental theorems are presented in the introductory part, whereas their proofs are provided in later chapters where specific topics are analyzed in more detail. The basic idea is to reduce the kinematic and dynamics of mass triangles to the congruence moduli space and the shape space, representing SO(3)-congruence and similarity classes respectively.In particular, the Euler eq...

Relational particle models are useful toy models for quantum cosmology and the problem of time in quantum general relativity. This paper shows how to extend existing work on concrete examples of relational particle models in 1-d to include a notion of scale. This is useful as regards forming a tight analogy with quantum cosmology and the emergent semiclassical time and hidden time approaches to the problem of time. This paper shows furthermore that the correspondence between ...

Relational particle mechanics is useful for modelling whole-universe issues such as quantum cosmology or the problem of time in quantum gravity, including some aspects outside the reach of comparably complex minisuperspace models. In this article, we consider the mechanics of pure shape and not scale of 4 particles on a line, so that the only physically significant quantities are ratios of relative separations between the constituents' physical objects. Many of our ideas and ...

We propose a solution to the problem of time for systems with a single global Hamiltonian constraint. Our solution stems from the observation that, for these theories, conventional gauge theory methods fail to capture the full classical dynamics of the system and must therefore be deemed inappropriate. We propose a new strategy for consistently quantizing systems with a relational notion of time that does capture the full classical dynamics of the system and allows for evolut...

The three-body problem is a fundamental long-standing open problem, with applications in all branches of physics, including astrophysics, nuclear physics and particle physics. In general, conserved quantities allow to reduce the formulation of a mechanical problem to fewer degrees of freedom, a process known as dynamical reduction. However, extant reductions are either non-general, or hide the problem's symmetry or include unexplained definitions. This paper presents a dynami...

As a straightforward generalization and extension of our previous paper, J. Phys. A50 (2017) 215201 we study aspects of the quantum and classical dynamics of a $3$-body system with equal masses, each body with $d$ degrees of freedom, with interaction depending only on mutual (relative) distances. The study is restricted to solutions in the space of relative motion which are functions of mutual (relative) distances only. It is shown that the ground state (and some other states...

[This is an expository article. I have submitted it to the American Mathematical Monthly.] The three-body problem defines a dynamics on the space of triangles in the plane. The shape sphere is the moduli space of oriented similarity classes of planar triangles and lies inside shape space, a Euclidean 3-space parametrizing oriented congruence classes of triangles. We derive and investigate the geometry and dynamics induced on these spaces by the three-body problem. We present ...

Equations of motion for single particle under two proper time model and three proper time model have been proposed and analyzed. The motions of particle are derived from pure classical method but they exhibit the same properties of quantum physics: the quantum wave equation, de Broglie equations, uncertainty relation, statistical result of quantum wave-function. This shows us a possible new way to interpret quantum physics. We will also prove that physics with multiple proper...

Strategies intended to resolve the problem of time in quantum gravity by means of emergent or hidden timefunctions are considered in the arena of relational particle toy models. In situations with `heavy' and `light' degrees of freedom, two notions of emergent semiclassical WKB time emerge; these are furthermore equivalent to two notions of emergent classical `Leibniz--Mach--Barbour' time. I futhermore study the semiclassical approach, in a geometric phase formalism, extended...