What is a Three Body Problem?
In: Physics
A lot of cool answers in here.
Here’s a simple one. Take two bouncy balls, drop one on the ground, and when it hits the ground, drop the second on top of it.
Which directions do you think they’ll go once hitting each other?
If you thought roughly up and roughly down, you’re probably right.
Now do it again, but this time have someone throw a third ball from the side. Any idea which way they’re going to go now?
Probably not. If you knew the exact velocity and direction of each ball when they made contact, you could probably do calculations to guess, though.
The third body introduces so much variability and randomness that we can’t forecast — we can only calculate.
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