Everyone of us had sometimes this awful feeling that some sign is lost in a calculation and that this sign is perturbing some fundamental understanding of what is going on. I feel the same has happened for me today and I can't figure this sign problem out, so I count on you. A Calogero-Moser system is defined as a Hamiltonian system with a Hamiltonian $$H=\sum p_i^2 + \sum_{i \neq k} \frac{1}{x_i-x_j}^2$$ It is widely known that this system is completely integrable. I am trying to understand this widely known fact. One of the proofs relies on the relation of the system with a linear flow in the space of matrices, the relationship is nicely explained in this MathOverflow entry: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/15031/is-the-massive-calogero-moser-system-still-integrable The question that I already asked as a comment there is the following: the standard proof of the integrability rewrites $H$ as a restriction of some other function on the space of matrices which is actually $\mathrm{Tr }Y^2$ for a matrix $Y$ defined by $$ Y_{ii}=p_i, \; Y_{ik}=(x_i-x_k)^{-1}, \; i\neq k $$. A simple calculation will give us not $H$ but $$H^-=\sum p_i^2 - \sum_{i \neq k} \frac{1}{x_i-x_j}^2$$ This is exactly the expression Etingof obtains in his *Lectures on Calogero-Moser systems*, http://www-math.mit.edu/~etingof/zlecnew.pdf. Etingof starts from the dynamics on matrix space and defines CM system as its symplectic reduction. So no problems for him. But for a system of the particles on the *real* line, I feel lost. How one can prove integrability? And also, $H^-$ is giving the trajectories that would collapse.