- #1
pi-r8
- 138
- 30
So when I first learned about Hamiltonians, my teacher presented them as something which you derived based Newton's second law, with the intermediate step of the Lagrangian. Doing it this way gets a Hamiltonian of the form H = T + V. Now I have a new teacher, who says that that these sorts of Hamiltonians are a special case, and that in general you can't derive them from anything. I was wondering how the people here approach the Hamiltonian- is it derived from something else, or simply developed (guessed) from experimental evidence? If you say that it's derived from a Lagrangian, please explain how you get the Lagrangian.