James' World 2

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Take a glance at our solar system and beyond, and outer space seems pretty orderly. Our eight planets travel around the Sun with apparent predictability, and even the stars themselves appear to march in orbit around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart. That’s why hundreds of years ago, astronomers and natural philosophers understandably referred to the cosmos as a kind of “Clockwork Universe,” one that was wound at creation and has been ticking along in complete perfection ever since.

A beautiful idea that’s also completely wrong.

In reality, the universe is filled with chaos, and nothing quite encapsulates that idea as perfectly as the Three-Body Problem. While enjoying some (long overdue) attention thanks Netflix’s new adaptation of a 2008 Chinese sci-fi novel of the same name, the Three-Body Problem is much more than some inventive sci-fi plotline — it’s a real-world astronomical conundrum that’s beguiled some of history’s greatest mathematical minds.

The problem itself is deceptively simple: Accurately predict the trajectory of three bodies (planets, suns, black holes, etc.), mutually attracted by gravity, when given their initial position and velocity. But despite the problem’s elegant simplicity, for centuries scientists have tried — and failed — to generate a solution, for the most part.

As is often the case with chaos mathematics, it’s complicated.

An Impossible Problem

To understand why determining the trajectories of three orbital bodies is such an impenetrable mess of physics, it’s best to go back — way back — to the beginning of the problem (and to most things gravitational) as first posed by Sir Isaac Newton in his masterwork, Principia. In this treatise, the English polymath laid out his laws of motion and universal gravitation, and with these new discoveries, he worked out the details of Earth’s orbit around the Sun (a classic hierarchical two-body problem). But then Newton stumbled across a problem he couldn’t quite solve: What happens when you add a third body?

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It’s more than an intriguing sci-fi book and show — it’s also an astronomical conundrum that’s beguiled some of the world’s greatest minds for more than three centuries.

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