Best Matching: Technical Details

The best matching procedure described in Chapter 4 is equivalent to the introduction of a principal fibre bundle in configuration space. Essentially one introduces a one-dimensional gauge connection on the time axis, which is a representation of the Euclidean group of rotations and translations (or, possibly, the similarity group which includes dilatations). To accommodate temporal relationalism, the variational principle needs to be invariant under reparametrizations. The simplest way to realize this in point–particle mechanics is to use Jacobi’s reformulation of Mapertuis’ principle. The chapter concludes with the relational reformulation of the Newtonian N-body problem (and its scale-invariant variant).