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
If you know the initial positions and velocities of TWO bodies, then Newton’s Law of Gravity can be solved into a neat formula, so that you can predict the position of both bodies at any arbitrary point in time merely by plugging in the appropriate values.
With THREE bodies, the interactions are too complex for a neat formulaic solution. The only way to calculate their positions is to numerically solve the equations over and over, iterating forward one small time step at a time. Essentially we can’t predict in advance how the system will behave, you have to just let it play out and see what happens.
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