Isn’t the 3 body problem (sun, Earth, Moon) very difficult to solve? How did humans predict future eclipses decades even centuries ago?
In: Planetary Science
If there is a regular pattern in some phenomenon, you do not need to know why that pattern occurs to be able to predict it in the future. Ancient astronomers did not know about the mechanics of the orbits of the Earth and the Moon, but they could observe that solar and lunar eclipses happened at regular intervals, and that eclipses at specific intervals were very similar, and from those patterns they were able to predict future ones.
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