Oct 7, 2016
In many mechanics problems, the phase space is the cotangent bundle of a configuration space.
José Natário
Glossary
tangent bundle means stuff attached to a point (eg, a wind attached to a point above Chicago)
co- has a couple (sometimes related) meanings, in this case "Go from X over A to Maps from X to A."
phase spaces and configuration spaces are two cases where a mathematisation of the physical world is definitely not going to be merely 3-D. We might attach a zillion particles to a 3-D grid, but the model would be zillion-dimensional, not 3-dimensional.
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