Hamilton’s Principle and the Conservation Laws

Abstract

In his celebrated Encyclopaedia article on the theory of relativity, Pauli explicitly acknowledged Hilbert’s formulation of the law of gravitation, Equation (37), and remarked:

At the same time as Einstein, and independently, Hilbert formulated the generally covariant field equations. His presentation, though, would not seem to be acceptable to physicists, for two reasons. First, the existence of a variational principle is introduced as an axiom. Secondly, of more importance, the field equations are not derived for an arbitrary system of matter, but specifically based on Mie’s theory of matter.²¹⁵