I recently finished watching the 3 Body Problem on Netflix so this question came to mind. Can anyone explain (in simple terms) why the 3 body problem was deemed unsolvable even by the advanced alien race in the series? Even better, can anyone here simplify what the 3 Body Problem actually is in Physics? It really got my curiosity. Thanks! 🙂
In: Physics
In short, in the show (and the books) it’s wrongly stated that it’s “not solvable” or that “it’s unpredictable”.
The 3 body problem, or rather N body problem, because it’s the same for any number greater than 2, is the problem of, how will the bodies move, if they all interact on each other with attractive force. The N(3+) body problem does not have a so called “General analytical solution” which means you cannot find a mathematical formula for the curves of your bodies. For two bodies you can do this. This means that the problem has to be solved numerically, which is an approximate solution.
Numerically solving something means you take the positions of your bodies, like a snapshot, and calculate all the forces that they interact with, then, you calculate how much they will move in a brief time period if those forces were constant. Then you use this new snapshot to calculate new forces, then again, and again.
The challenge with this type of solving is that it depends a lot on these time steps, and how you calculate the things, so, sometimes, you can acumulate a big error. However, for somethiong like a star system, a civilization as advanced as the Trisolarans, should have computational power to estimate the evolution of their system very, very, very accurately on the scale of millenia.
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