I was in physics and had a brief conversation on chaos theory and we started talking about space and he briefly mentioned about the 3 body problem.
Thing is, everything interacts with other things for a reason right? I understand it’s complicated, but if you know all the necessary data, why can’t we do it?
In: Planetary Science
Imagine you have three objects A, B, and C that each exert a force on each other based off of their distance. Let’s say they repel each other, and the repelling force gets stronger the closer they get.
You want to know how object A will move over time. In order to know this you need to know what forces are acting on A. In order to know that you need to know where B and C are as you need know how far they are from A. So to find how the force changes over time you need to know how B and C move over time. But now our argument goes in a circle, because to find how B moves over time you need to know how A and C move over time. To find how C moves over time you need to know how A and B move over time. ect. So generally you can’t exactly calculate the movements and have to approximate things.
Because all of these objects are moving independently the forces they exert on one another change widely based off of their movements, and no consistent behavior arises. This is where chaos theory comes in. This inconsistency ends up meaning that changing initial conditions even slightly can result in wildly different behavior. This includes errors introduced in the approximations you had to take to calculate things. So it ends up being basically impossible to actually calculate how the system will change over time.
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