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9 votes
3 answers
407 views

Mechanical systems with their configuration space being a Lie group

Cross-posted from Physics.SE In Marsden, Ratiu - Introduction To Mechanics And Symmetry there is a certain focus on reducing cotangent bundles of Lie groups. More precisely, if $G$ is a Lie group, ...
49 votes
5 answers
4k views

are there natural examples of classical mechanics that happens on a symplectic manifold that isn't a cotangent bundle?

I'm curious about just how far the abstraction to a symplectic formalism can be justified by appeal to actual physical examples. There's good motivation, for example, for working over an arbitrary ...