The real three body problem is how did it get into orbit in the first place, if it’s going to eventually be chaotic and break apart (wobble off into oblivion… despite oblivion not really being the case). Right?
Because both Newton & Laplace said it couldn’t be predicted (apparently Newton used God as an explanation for why it came together in the first place, right? NDT mentions “fixes it”—can someone give me Newton’s exact quote & the source?).
Didn’t Laplace’s demon (NDT doesn’t mention) have to do with the unpredictability?
Neil Degrasse Tyson explains that the perturbations balance out. If that is the case (balanced perturbations), why is chaos still in the situation (though it takes longer than “originally” thought—quote?) — and yet stuff came together?
Also why is Liebniz completely left out of the discussion?
This is a weird question. “How did X happen, if eventually X isn’t going to be true”. Plenty of things happen for a time and then stop happening. Even the orbit of the moon around the earth, and the earth around the sun, aren’t permanently perfectly constant. Eventually the earth will either spin off away from the sun or collide with it (apparently the answer is an eventual collision).
So, in general, things can get into orbit even if eventually those orbits will break somehow.
No, the gutoe isn’t supposed to solve the three body problem. I think one confusion here is that you may have the wrong end of the stick on what someone means by “predictable”. It doesn’t mean what many people think is the intuitive obvious meaning. Can you tell me what you think it means?
A lot of people intuitively think it means something like “completely incalculable” or even “indeterministic”. It actually doesn’t mean either of those things, it means something more subtle.
An okay, it was the “100% predictability” part that made me think that. Three body problems are 100% predictable even now, for certain definitions of ‘predictable’ - and they’re “unpredictable” even in principle, for certain other definitions of predictable, and a theory of everything wouldn’t change that.
The point of a theory of everything isn’t to make three body problems more solvable, it’s to understand fundamental reality and what it’s composed of and how those components work and interact. It’s not the job of a theory of everything to make three body problems easier to solve.
It’s a mathematical problem, not a “what are things made of” problem. A theory of everything is for the second type of problem, not the first.
I know a theory of everything won’t solve three body problems for the same reason I know the probe going to Jupiter isn’t going to find my misplaced credit card. They’re not looking in remotely the right place for that sort of thing, they’re for entirely different purposes than that.
