In the mid-seventeenth century Isaac Newton formalized the language necessary to
describe the evolution of physical systems. Newton argued that the evolution of the
state of a process can be described entirely in terms of the forces involved
with the process. About a century and a half later, William Hamilton was
able to establish the whole of Newtonian mechanics without ever using the
concept of force. Rather, Hamilton argued that a physical system will evolve in
such a way as to extremize the integral of the difference between the kinetic
and potential energies. This paradigmatic reformulation allows for a type of
reverse engineering of physical systems. This paper will use the Hamiltonian
formulation of a nonlinear damped harmonic oscillator with third and fifth order
nonlinearities to establish the existence of localized solutions of the governing model.
These localized solutions are commonly known in mathematical physics as
solitons. The data obtained from the variational method will be used to
numerically integrate the equation of motion, and find the exact solution
numerically.