Abstract
Variational principles are of great universality and play a major role in the description of natural phenomena. The minimum hypothesis to explain nature has been present in ideas presented by early Greeks whose philosophy seems to be based on the principle that “Nature does nothing in vain”. Such ‘economy’ postulates in the hands of later scientists acted as the foundation for the development of minimum principles such as Fermat’s principle. If one studies the chronological development in the evolution of minimum principles one can get a profound insight into the continuos transformation of a metaphysical canon into an exact natural law.
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Lakshminarayanan, V., Ghatak, A.K., Thyagarajan, K. (2002). Introduction. In: Lagrangian Optics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1711-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1711-5_1
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