{
  "annotation_id": "4fd69b36-d2da-4415-91f7-3679462ce52d",
  "date_created": "2026-03-02T18:00:53.677000Z",
  "date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:00:53.677000Z",
  "file_hash": "a308a05f0825987635393b4c02417fa2661a12d9d58689237c417f55847b2ce6",
  "private": false,
  "record": {
    "abstract": "I extract some philosophical morals from some aspects of Lagrangian\nmechanics. (A companion paper will present similar morals from Hamiltonian\nmechanics and Hamilton-Jacobi theory.) One main moral concerns methodology:\nLagrangian mechanics provides a level of description of phenomena which has\nbeen largely ignored by philosophers, since it falls between their accustomed\nlevels--``laws of nature\u0027\u0027 and ``models\u0027\u0027. Another main moral concerns\nontology: the ontology of Lagrangian mechanics is both more subtle and more\nproblematic than philosophers often realize.\n  The treatment of Lagrangian mechanics provides an introduction to the subject\nfor philosophers, and is technically elementary. In particular, it is confined\nto systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom, and for the most part\neschews modern geometry. But it includes a presentation of Routhian reduction\nand of Noether\u0027s ``first theorem\u0027\u0027.",
    "arxiv_id": "physics/0409030",
    "authors": [
      "Jeremy Butterfield"
    ],
    "categories": [
      "physics.class-ph",
      "physics.gen-ph",
      "physics.hist-ph"
    ],
    "title": "Between Laws and Models: Some Philosophical Morals of Lagrangian   Mechanics",
    "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0409030"
  },
  "schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
  "source": {
    "execution_id": "140aea5d-6bc5-4b5b-bce6-51c9869d0e0c",
    "id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
    "type": "Model",
    "variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
    "version": "0.1.0"
  },
  "user_id": 1000002
}