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
For 2 bodys you can derive a formula that describes how the two bodies will behave for every constellation and every time. That is called an analytical solution.
For 3 or more bodies there is no such formula. However you can still predict how the planets will move. Basically if you know the position of the planet you can calculate where it will be shortly afterwards. You can use this new position to calculate the next step and so on.
That way you can still calculate a movement. But instead of a general formula, you only get a list of numbers, which are specific for this situation.
But that is not really a problem for real life applications. Most real life things can only be calculated numerically, anyway. Analytical solutions only exists for very few situations.
That many 3 body problems tend to be chaotic, means that a small change in the initial situation can lead to large differences in the outcome after some time. Depending on your situation and your timescales and what you want to achieve with your calculations this might or might not be a problem.
And also there: many systems behave chaotic, that’s nothing too special about the three body system. The interesting thing is, that it already occurs in such a simple system. For complex things like the weather it seems more obvious that It behaves chaotic
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